Google Now Laying Fiber for Super-Fast Internet
Kansas City is receiving the first dose of Google Fiber, the search engine giant's 1 Gbps fiber optic network.
Monday in a blog, Google said that it is finally installing "thousands of miles of" fiber optic cable for its super-fast "Google Fiber" network. The lines will be installed between Kansas City, Kansas and Kansas City, Missouri, creating a solid backbone which later will branch out to all Kansas City consumers on both sides of the state line, providing download speeds more than 100 times faster than current broadband solutions.
"Each cable contains many thin glass fibers, each about the width of a human hair," Kevin Lo, the Google executive heading up the project. "We’ll be taking these cables and weaving them into a fiber backbone -- a completely new high speed infrastructure."
The Kansas City Star reports that the project was stalled by the Kansas City Board of Public Utilities over issues about where Google would attach the fiber optic cables to their poles. The BPU is owned by the Unified Government of Wyandotte County who penned the original agreement that gave the Google Fiber project a green light.
The agreement, according to the paper, said that Google would install its cable in the upper portion of the utility pole, a reserved space normally used by electrical lines. This space is free to use, but would cost Google extra to pay for more specialized and highly paid linemen to install the lines. Google was also faced with costlier engineering work by mounting its network in the upper region.
But typically telephone and cable companies attach their lines on the lower end and pay fees for using that space. These fees help defray the cost of erecting and maintaining the poles. Google eventually chose to take this route and pay the fees instead of sticking with the original agreement. The estimated difference in cost between the two regions was not provided.
When officially launched, Google's network will provide speeds of 1 Gbps -- about 100 times faster than existing broadband services currently providing Internet access to homes nationwide. Uploads of data to the Internet will move at the same speed, or 1000 times that of the current U.S. residential average.
"We’ve measured utility poles; we’ve studied maps and surveyed neighborhoods; we’ve come up with a comprehensive set of detailed engineering plans; and we’ve eaten way too much barbecue. Now, starting today, we’re ready to lay fiber," Kevin Lo said.
Time to move to Kansas City.
Right behind you
...and theoretically 10x faster than my LAN connection of 100Mbps. So it download movies faster than transferring it to my other computer.
Buy a gigabit ethernet card
Right behind you
No one on these forums have said it yet so I will: everything's bigger in Texas.
Eliminate them all Google!!!
Include in there that french company that offers inferior maps to your free ones for a price.
Yeeeaaaaah, this article has nothing to do with Texas. At all.
Good for Google, I hope they expand this real soon.
Remains to be seen if Google will extend this service all the way to the consumer (like a regular ISP, only better), or they will end up leasing this "highway" to the usual perpetrators. I for one hope for the former.
Thats what I was hoping I'd see in this article. The former sounds more likely though, sadly.
I have used fiber optic between two PCs 4km apart on a network of fiber optic. I had no latency. It felt like i was using the computer right infront of me using the windows login. I wish that they would lay fiber optic in the country areas where there is a lack of internet.
There are torrents, and future streaming options to match demand and supply and put the stress on the networks when absolutely needed, like streaming from multiple sources, as in each user gets that streamed video and is still holding it in memory and uploading it for the neighbour who is watching the same show but came home half a hour later.
Just because it is of not that beneficial now (and torrents are now
Caps on bandwidth are the very exact opposite.