MIT’s Technology Review magazine praises Google Fiber for spurring broadband investment.
State and local governments had done little to disrupt the status quo or push ISPs to invest in upgrades. And governments also showed little interest in subsidizing, let alone fully paying for, a better infrastructure themselves. (There was money allocated to broadband investment in the 2009 stimulus bill, but it went mainly to wire underserved areas rather than lay fiber.) On the municipal level, most cities still had building regulations and permit requirements that, inadvertently or not, tended to discourage the laying of new line, particularly by new entrants. And in many cases, even if cities were interested in building or operating their own high-speed networks, state laws barred them from doing so. The result of all these factors was that the United States, slowly but certainly, began falling well behind countries like Sweden, South Korea, and Japan when it came to affordable, abundant bandwidth.
Five years later, things look very different. The United States is still behind Sweden and South Korea. But fiber-to-the-home service is now a reality in cities across the country. Google Fiber, which first rolled out in Kansas City in the fall of 2012, is now operating in Austin, Texas, and Provo, Utah, and Google says it will expand next to Atlanta, Salt Lake City, Nashville, and Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, with another five major metro areas potentially on the horizon. The biggest impact, though, has arguably been the response from big broadband providers.
