I have apartments in two cities, Chicago and Kansas City, Missouri. And the one in Kansas City is getting the fastest Internet connection available in the US, fiber to the home, 1 gigabit down AND up. The last is what matters most, as I shoot concerts and right now, my cable connection limits my upload speed so much that a single song uploaded in 1080 resolution takes an hour.
I’ve been following the whole Google Fiber thing since it was announced in February of 2010. 1100 communities competed to get Google to pick them, and Kansas City, Kansas won. They didn’t explicitly state what the criteria were, but from what I know of KCK, it was a mixture of several factors:
[ol]
[li]Centrally located[/li][li]Utility owned by the city[/li][li]Utility poles everywhere, so little digging[/li][li]Loads of fiber already coming into the area[/li][li]Economically depressed[/li][/ol]
Kansas City is nearly the geographical center of the US, and is a major rail hub. And railroad right-of-ways are the ideal route for fiber - they are thin strips of land connecting every city and town in the country. Back in the boom, people laid tons of fiber that has never been lit up, and a lot of it connects here.
On #5, Kansas City Kansas is (not to dump on them too much) a shit-hole. The downtown is almost entirely empty storefronts, and the only music venue, Memorial Hall, hasn’t been used for concerts in decades. The only tourist attraction is a rather embarrassing Indian casino.
A few weeks after KCK was chosen, KCMO Mayor Sly James made the case to Google that if they were going to hook up KCK, it was silly to stop at the state line, because both cities are really one city with two governments. He was successful, and after a lot or wrangling, they worked out a deal where Google could use the KCMO utility poles as well. It it telling in that, though they hooked up homes in KCK first, the Google “Fiber Space” where you can check out the speed, is on the Missouri side of the state line.
When they launched, they did a type of “red-lining”. They divided the cities into “fiberhoods”, centered around various schools and universities with goals for each. If your area met it’s goal, the school would get a free connection. And the area that got the highest percentage of people to pre-register got connected first. Predictably, the neighborhoods with the highest per-capita income got connected first, but community activists did manage to get some depressed areas high ranked by paying some folks’ $10 registration fee.
My area is #9 on the Missouri list, and it is getting connected this month. (Sadly, St. Elizabeth’s is getting free fiber, rather than being bulldozed to the ground.)
Google just installed the support wire behind my apartment, and we signed up for the full package - gigabit Internet and 120 channels of HDTV for $120 a month. I expect to see them hang the fiber within the next two weeks, followed by them hangin the fiber, followed by the drop to the building then the final connection.
From what I understand, they have spent a huge amount of time building infrastructure and have barely more than 1000 homes hooked up so far. I can’t wait!
