Google this afternoon officially confirmed that they'll be bringing Google Fiber to Provo, Utah. According to an announcement sent to reporters and a blog post, Provo was selected because it's the home of hundreds of tech companies and startups. The fact it already had a ton of fiber in the ground courtesy of previous municipal fiber deployments certainly helped; Google says they'll be buying the deployed fiber to the home assets of iProvo pending city council approval on April 23.

Provo started building their own fiber network back in 2004. The deployment struggled due to a combination of incompetence, bad accounting and unrelenting attacks from regional incumbent Qwest. It was sold in 2008 to Broadweave for $40 Million, then re-acquired by the city in 2012 and leased to a company by the name of Veracity.

"In order to bring Fiber to Provo, we’ve signed an agreement to purchase iProvo, an existing fiber-optic network owned by the city," said Google Fiber General Manager Kevin Lo. "As a part of the acquisition, we would commit to upgrade the network to gigabit technology and finish network construction so that every home along the existing iProvo network would have the opportunity to connect to Google Fiber."

...we would commit to upgrade the network to gigabit technology and finish network construction so that every home along the existing iProvo network would have the opportunity to connect to Google Fiber. -Google

The acquisition of existing municipal fiber deployments is an interesting twist on the Google Fiber story, and if repeated elsewhere could reduce steep deployment costs significantly. Portions of Utah are also home to Utopia, a municipal fiber deployment with a similar history of cash and incumbent attack woes. Utopia currently offers 1 Gbps connections for around $300, and could prove an attractive target for potential Google Fiber expansion across Utah.

The arrival of $70 1 Gbps Google Fiber connections is the competitive equivalent of a nuclear bomb for regional incumbent CenturyLink, who merged with Qwest in 2011. Thanks to pathetic regional competition, the majority of CenturyLink customers are lucky to see 1.5 Mbps downstream, 896 kbps upstream. I recently confirmed CenturyLink also now caps these users at 150 GB per month for speeds of 1.5 Mbps or slower, and 250 GB for anything faster.

However big a thorn in the side Google Fiber is for larger incumbents Time Warner Cable and AT&T, it's an absolutely nightmare for a smaller, stingier bully like CenturyLink, who'll for the very first time face a regional competitor with the money and legal resources to bite back.