Ever since the search engine giant announced their Google Fiber project, cities around the US performed various stunts in order to get Google’s attention.
Google was suppose to announce a winner by December of 2010, but decided to push back the announcement in order to gain more time researching every city who applied.
Although Google has not indicated an official date of when the winner would be announced, it’s probable that the winner will be revealed next month (at least according to an archived blog post).
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. (Official Google Blog)
Note: Emphasis mine.
Assuming “early” means the first quarter of the year, Google is probably going to unveil the winner next month in March, which will bless one city or community with 1 GB/s downloading speeds.
While Google’s entrance into the data pipe world might cause a few telecoms to tremble, the Mountain View giant is allowing competing companies to piggy back off Google’s dark fiber in order to service current customers.
Currently over 1,100 cities in the US are contending for the right to “beta test” Google fiber, and while Google can not unfortunately bring dark fiber to everyone, they may just light a fire underneath the telecoms to provide something similar nationwide.
Originally posted on February 28, 2011 @ 2:46 pm