Thursday, March 21, 2013

Google fiber will expand to Olathe, Kansas

Google chose Kansas City for its first gigabit fiber network, and they just picked the second city, nearby Olathe, Kansas.

Google skipped over Kansas City suburbs like Prairie Village, Mission, Shawnee and Overland Park to bring their gigabit fiber to Olathe, a separate city with 125,000 residents. I lived in Prairie Village while in high school, and at the time, Olathe was way out in the sticks. Times have changed.

Does this portend more Google Fiber cities? Are they just trying to make a point to get the incumbent cable companies off the dime? Time will tell.

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Update 4/9/2013

As rumored for some time, Google has announced that they will extend Google Fiber to Austin Texas.  Austin is about the same size as Kansas City and it a hi-tech hotbed.  Google will gain insight into future applications of high speed networks and it will not cost them much.  In the wake of the Austin rumors, we also saw speculation on the cost of the Kansas City networks and of a nationwide buildout.  Eric Schmidt has been quoted as saying that gigabit Internet is a real business.  Maybe they will focus on somewhat small, hi-tech cities??

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