More Than 1,100 Communities Want Google

For those that may have missed it, the deadline to apply to be part of Google’s fiber network experiment passed last Friday.  The final tally?  More than 1,100 communities responded, with over 194,000 individual responses in support of their local community.

The map was rather interesting.  While the dots are rather large, it appears that there might be some communities of NTCA member companies that applied.  In the map below each “small” dot represents a government response, and each large dot represents locations where more than 1,000 residents submitted a nomination.

So what’s next?  Google plans to cull through the nominations, conduct site visits, and determine where they want to start their grand experiment.  And by experiment, we mean installing FTTH to every household in that community- something many of our members have been doing for some time.  But they won’t be overbuilding every community:

Of course, we’re not going to be able to build in every interested community — our plan is to reach a total of at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people with this experiment. Wherever we decide to build, we hope to learn lessons that will help improve Internet access everywhere. After all, you shouldn’t have to jump into frozen lakes and shark tanks to get ultra high-speed broadband.

The good news: Google plans on releasing the complete list of government responses at some point.  Stay tuned to the New Edge- we’ll be sure to have a posting on that data when available.  This could bode well for NTCA members that are willing to partner with their local communities to help bring fiber to them.  And if you have FTTH in a community that applied, it might be time to double your PR efforts.

Related posts:

1. Google Launches ‘Fiber for Communities’ Website
2. Google Picks Kansas City for FTTH Network
3. Google Begins Fiber Network Trials at Stanford
4. VOTW: Learning Communities within a High School
5. Google’s Next-Gen Network is Delayed by Pole Attachments