It appears that Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG) fiber service will next pop up in Austin, Texas, the hotbed home of high tech companies as well as an old familiar foe, Time Warner Cable (NYSE: TWC), and some new competition in AT&T's (NYSE: T) U-verse service.
According to a report in Ubergizmo, press invites have been issued jointly by both the city and Google concerning a "very important announcement" the two will be making jointly on April 9. Google, of course, hasn't confirmed anything but, the publication said, a Google blog post was inadvertently (perhaps) issued last week that confirmed that Austin was the next target.
The invitation, reported by VentureBeat, seems to leave little to the imagination, noting: "The City of Austin and Google will make a very important announcement that will have a positive impact on Austinites and the future of the city. We anticipate more than 100 community leaders and elected officials to be in attendance to celebrate this announcement."
It also cagily skirts the reason for the invite, noting, "We cannot share the details of the announcement with you in advance (however) we know readers will want to learn more, so we encourage you to join us on Tuesday."
There had been some initial thought that Kansas City was serving only as a test bed for the 1 Gbps broadband service, although Google executives, led by chairman Eric Schmidt, have always maintained it will expand elsewhere in the country. The initial rollout, just in its infant stages, has already drawn the attention of startup tech companies which have been rolling into the Kansas/Missouri cities to set up businesses, causing the communities to become known as Silicon Prairie.
What they'll call Austin, if anything, is of course unclear, although with the presence of Dell, National Instruments, Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) (which operates a call center) and Samsung within the city environs, "Austin is very much a tech-focused city," the VentureBeat story concluded. Austin, it should be noted, was one of the cities competing to become the first Google Fiber site, before that honor went to Kansas City.
For more:
- Ubergizmo has this story
- and VentureBeat reported this story
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