subject: Google's Fibre Project Winner Announced [print this page] Google's Fibre Project Winner Announced Google's Fibre Project Winner Announced
Google has recently announced the winner of their Fibre Project to be Kansas City, Kansas, in the heart of the United States. It is the goal of Google to roll out ultra-high speed internet access to millions of people by installing miles of fibre optic cables and allowing all internet providers to share use of the infrastructure.
Whilst the current speed of home broadband in the US can range from one to twenty or thirty megabytes, the new initiative by Google will provide access to one gigabyte of data, one hundred times faster than current speeds. Over the past year and a half, Google has been searching for test cities to partner with in order to begin this huge new initiative.
There have been pitches by mayors, businessmen, teachers, and interested citizens to persuade the search engine giant to pick their city from the near 1,100 entries for the internet overhaul. Topeka, the Kansas state capital, even went as far as renaming their city from "Topeka, KS" to "Google, KS" for the entire month of March, 2010.
Google responded with flattery and renamed the Google search engine to "Topeka" for a day on April 1st. However, even this extreme pitch wasn't able to lure the blessings of the Google network to Topeka, as they were snubbed for their neighbour to the east.
Much of the community came together to seduce Google to Kansas City, and afterwards a video was made by Google that included many of those involved in the original process. In it, Mayor Joe Reardon speaks of the lack of internet access, Sporting KC (the professional football team for Kansas City) talks about how frustrated it has been with the slow broadband and how it inhibits his business, and local entrepreneur Bo Fishback eloquently claims that the new Google investment in Kansas City is a "huge bet on human creativity".
It will take some time to build the infrastructure in the city, but the hope around the world is that the project provides incredibly positive results. If it goes well in Kansas City it could mean that the blazing fast fibre optic speeds could soon find their way to the UK to improve both home and mobile broadband connections. This would be huge for a community that is notoriously behind on connection speeds for such a technologically advanced country.
Work is not expected to be started on installing the new system in Kansas City until sometime in 2012. After it is completed it will take a while to report the impact the new speeds have on the community and whether or not it will work on a larger scale. It may be years before this is rolled out across the globe, so sit tight and keep your fingers crossed.
