Over 1,100 cities have been anxiously anticipating Google’s announcement of the city or cities they will select for their Google Fiber for Communities project. Although internally they have been ramping up activities, they have been very quiet on the public front until yesterday. On the Official Google Blog, Minnie Ingersoll released a wonderful video thanking communities for their responses and effort, and she announced a new web site for the project.
The YouTube video is a sincere collage (complete with tear jerking music) of some of the publicity and activities cities have done supporting the project. Take the 2 minutes and 5 seconds to watch it. The video is a brief reminder of how consumers want more bandwidth beyond what is traditionally offered to them.
Google’s Fiber for Communities web site is their call to action for citizens to participate in the process of removing legal and regulatory roadblocks to open-access municipal broadband. Also, it is where Google disseminates information as the project progresses. The citizens of North Carolina recently defeated a measure heavily driven by the incumbents that would have prevented municipalities from participating in building broadband networks. This is an example of the kind of grass-roots effort Google is encouraging on their site. Here in Boulder we will face challenges in the construction of this network. Many of us in the city and related industries have been working to eliminate these challenges for years. Fortunately we are not prohibited from building an open-access municipal broadband network, but there are hurdles and requirements that must be met. We welcome community participation in this effort. Feel free to comment if you are interested in participating.
In February we announced our plans to build experimental, ultra-high speed broadband networks. Over the past several months, our team’s been hard at work reviewing the nearly 1,100 community responses to our request for information—not to mention the nearly 200,000 responses from individuals across the U.S.
Throughout this process, one message has come through loud and clear: people are hungry for better and faster Internet access. With that in mind, today we’re launching a new site called Google Fiber for Communities, where you can learn more about fiber networks and keep up-to-date on our project. You’ll also be able to advocate for common-sense federal and local policies that would help fiber deployments nationwide.
The search engine company, which in February announced it wants to build fiber-optic networks in one or more U.S. cities, gave one local politician and several Utopia executives something to smile about when it invited them in late June to its headquarters to discuss the project.
“They were interested in our [Utopia’s] deployment model, our service providers and the technology we were using,” said West Valley City Mayor Mike Winder. He accompanied Utopia Executive Director Todd Marriott and two other network executives to the June 22 meeting in Mountain View, Calif.
In our continuing series of previews for the “Connected States of America” documentary, TelecomTV’s Guy Daniels visits the headquarters of Google to learn more about the companys plans to create a Fibre City. In an exclusive interview with Google Chief Technology Advocate, Michael Jones, it now appears that there may be more than one winner — good news to the 11,000 cities that want the prize. Further previews will appear in NewsDesk every week.
