Google today announced that they will be delaying announcing which city will be the lucky recipient of their planned 1 Gbps fiber to the home deployment, first announced early this year. A delay makes sense if you've been following the project; Google wants to use their Stanford deployment to inform their larger city-wide deployment, and the Stanford network won't even be built until early next year. According to the Google blog post, nothing is changing in their city selection process, the company simply needs more time:
quote:
We had planned to announce our selected community or communities by the end of this year, but the level of interest was incredible—nearly 1,100 communities across the country responded to our announcement—and exceeded our expectations. While we’re moving ahead full steam on this project, we’re not quite ready to make that announcement. We’re sorry for this delay, but we want to make sure we get this right. To be clear, we’re not re-opening our selection process—we simply need more time to decide than we’d anticipated. Stay tuned for an announcement in early 2011.
Those of you who've been around here for a while might recognize the name of Google employee Milo Medin. He's Google's new VP of Access Services, and used to work with both M2Z networks (the company that wanted to offer
free national Wi-Fi in exchange for free spectrum)
and Excite@Home, one of the industry's earliest ISPs that
flamed out spectacularly in 2001 (with
a little help). As we've
covered at length, Google doesn't want to be an ISP. Instead, they'll provide
other ISPs wholesale access to a network serving between 50,000 and 500,000 consumers. Google's interest is in studying broadband usage and congestion, gathering data useful in policy debates and marketing, and testing next-generation ad delivery services. 1,100 communities enthusiastically vied for Google's affection creating a free PR bonanza for Google over much of the last year; said enthusiasm telling you a little bit about how satisfied those towns and cities are with their current broadband options.
