Gigabit Internet from Google

It looks like St. Louis is making a serious bid to get Google’s high speed fiber network installed in the city. We’ve been shopping around for faster service lately and would love to see prices come down and speeds go up. It looks like Google wants them to go up a lot with mind boggling speeds of 1Gbps.

Google is asking for “interested communities” to apply, and launch markets will be announced later this year. Well Google, St. Louis is in!

Google is planning to build, and test ultra-high speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the country. We’ll deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today with 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections. We’ll offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000, and potentially up to 500,000 people.

For more information visit Mayor Slay’s site and take his poll or head over to the Facebook Group, RFT, Business Journal or search it on Google.

Here’s Google explaining how it would work:

Show Your Support

To show your support for St. Louis visit this link: http://www.google.com/appserve/fiberrfi/

The following was posted on Mayor Slay’s website:

Google St. Louis, Please

Google caught our attention – and pretty much everyone else’s – with a pair of recent announcements. The international technology company announced last month that it planned to spend millions of dollars to build out (at least) one fiber network capable of speeds of 1 gigabit per second, about 20 to 100 times faster than any competitor’s. And it said that it was asking cities across the United States to signal their interest in being the test market.

The thought of super speedy Google broadband – and the chance to bring it home – has set off a wicked competition among broadband starved municipalities. Partisans in Topeka have dressed up in special t-shirts; celebratory songs have been commissioned; promotional coupons have been printed; mayors and councils have read resolutions changing their community’s names to Google; fans have launched FaceBook and YouTube (and pretty much any tool developed by Google) campaigns; and – in the background – teams of municipal IT professionals and engineers have been working feverishly pulling together the reams of documentation that Google has requested before the end of March.

Mayor Francis Slay, an inveterate blogger and user of Twitter, has told his readers and followers that he will also propose the City of St. Louis as the first home of the Google Fiber network. And City staffers, volunteers, planners, writers, and a committee of the Vanguard Cabinet have been hard at work on the St. Louis bid for several weeks. This week’s Mini-Poll is a part of that effort, because the pro-Googlers plan to use it to quantify the intensity of public interest in better and wider broadband access. And they hope to see if changing the name of the city for a day or two to something Googlesque would meet with your approval.

Continue on to Mayor Slay’s official site to take the poll and make sure to visit Google to tell them why we need their service in Saint Louis.

Lets make this happen.

-james

Tagged as: Google, Google Gigabit, St. Louis