Google Fiber coming to Raleigh?
Google is considering the Triangle area for its next rollout of Google Fiber! As a veteran of the broadband fights here in North Carolina and the founder of the Bring Google Fiber to Raleigh! Facebook group, I am thrilled that we’re being considered for this.
Last week’s snowstorm provided me a perfect use case for Google Fiber. I was itching to organize a musical jam session with a few neighbors only travel conditions were too dangerous to all get together in one place. While one can do video chats with our current, abysmally-slow broadband connections, playing in time with others remotely requires highly-synchronized connections. These could be done with low-bandwidth and exorbitantly-priced ISDN circuits or on high-bandwidth, uncompressed fiber networks like Google Fiber.
I think adding Google Fiber to our area’s mix will benefit our musicians as much as our techno-geeks, pharmaceutical scientists and our other traditional area jobs.
Over the last few years, gigabit Internet has moved from idea to reality, with dozens of communities PDF working hard to build networks with speeds 100 times faster than what most of us live with today. People are hungrier than ever for faster Internet, and as a result, cities across America are making speed a priority. Hundreds of mayors from across the U.S. have stated PDF that abundant high-speed Internet access is essential for sparking innovation, driving economic growth and improving education. Portland, Nashville PDF and dozens of others have made high-speed broadband a pillar of their economic development plans. And Julian Castro, the mayor of San Antonio, declared in June that every school should have access to gigabit speeds by 2020.
We’ve long believed that the Internet’s next chapter will be built on gigabit speeds, so it’s fantastic to see this momentum. And now that we’ve learned a lot from our Google Fiber projects in Kansas City, Austin and Provo, we want to help build more ultra-fast networks. So we’ve invited cities in nine metro areas around the U.S.—34 cities altogether—to work with us to explore what it would take to bring them Google Fiber.