Associated Press
DULUTH, Minn. — Wearing just a T-shirt and shorts, Mayor Don Ness strolled to the end of a dock jutting into frigid Lake Superior. He grinned, waved his arms to a cheering crowd, and jumped in.
“I’ve laid down the gauntlet!” Ness cried, shivering and dripping as he emerged from the lake in a video posted on YouTube. “All right, you other mayors! You want Google Fiber, you jump in Lake Superior!”
They may not be taking a lake plunge, but city leaders around the country, including here in Durham, are competing hard for Google’s experimental fiber-optic network, which promises to be more than 100 times faster than the Internet connections currently available to most Americans.
Topeka, Kan., informally renamed itself “Google, Kansas,” for the month of March. A group in Baltimore launched a Web site that uses Google mapping to plot the location of more than 1,000 residents and gives their reasons for wanting the service. Other cities in pursuit include Cincinnati, Portland, Ore., Grand Rapids, Mich., Rochester, N.Y., Baton Rouge, La. More than 200 groups on Facebook are pushing different cities and counties for Google’s broadband plan.
“People are hungry for faster speeds and improved Internet access,” Google spokesman Dan Martin said.
Google said several thousand citizens have nominated their communities since it announced plans in mid-February to build the network in a handful of areas. The company has set a March 26 deadline for city governments and citizens to express interest, and Google plans to announce winners by the end of the year. Martin said Google can’t say when it will start building the new networks but hopes to start soon.
Google’s experimental fiber-optic networks would deliver data at 1 gigabit per second to homes and businesses. That would be roughly 50 to 300 times faster than the DSL, cable and fiber-optic networks that connect most U.S. homes to the Internet today. Google has not said how many cities it intends to serve, or how much it is willing to spend to do it.
Google says it’s not interested in dominating or even grabbing a sizable chunk of the broadband market. Instead it says it hopes phone and cable companies will learn lessons from the experimental network that will help them hurry the rollout of their own faster systems. It also hopes to provide a testbed for online video and other advanced applications that require a lot of bandwidth.
“Google makes more money the more eyeballs are online,” said Sascha Meinrath, director of the nonpartisan New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative.
In choosing sites, Google is looking for wide community support and readiness, said Meinrath, who has been talking with the company about the project.
“They want a fast, easy rollout,” he said. “They are really looking for a community that is fully bought into this.”
