Google fiber: Palo Alto loses out to Kansas City

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Midwest community to get ultra high-speed Internet project instead of Silicon Valley

by Sue Dremann
Palo Alto Weekly Staff

The Official Seal of Palo Alto, CA

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A Midwest city has beaten out all Silicon Valley contenders, including Palo Alto, to become Google’s first fiber-optics-wired city, executives announced Wednesday (March 30).

Kansas City, with a population of 145,786, was chosen out of 1,100 cities that applied in 2010 for the “Google Fiber for Communities” project, sponsored by the Mountain View tech giant.

The ultra high-speed fiber-to-the-home connections will provide Internet access at 100 times faster than typical broadband services, the company said. Fiber transmits light over fiber-optic cable — a strand of glass as thin as a hair — to send and receive data. It is far faster than electric signals sent over metal wires.

Palo Alto officials and technophiles aggressively wooed Google, creating a video and deluging the company with e-mail in support of bringing fiber to Palo Alto. The city sent a letter to the company last month seeking to further define its history and connections with Google in a last-ditch bid for the project.

But in the end, less tech-connected Kansas City won out.

“We were absolutely blown away by the leadership — the mayor, the city staff, the utilities as well,” Google General Manager Kevin Lo said in a YouTube video.

A company spokesperson did not elaborate on the reasons the Midwest city was chosen or where Palo Alto ranked in the contest, but Kansas City Mayor Joe Reardon said in a press release that “the wonderful diversity of our community, neighborhoods and industry make Kansas City, Kansas a microcosm for the rest of the country.

Article Continued on Palo Alto Online…

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About Mark Milliman

Mark Milliman is a Principal Consultant at Inphotonics Research driving the adoption and assisting local governments to plan, build, operate, and lease access open-access municipal broadband networks. Additionally, he works with entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to increase the value of their intellectual capital through the creation of strategic product plans and execution of innovative marketing strategies. With more than 22 years of experience in the telecommunications industry that began at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Mark has built fiber, cable, and wireless networks around the world to deliver voice, video, and data services. His thorough knowledge of all aspects of service delivery from content creation to the design, operation, and management of the network is utilized by carriers and equipment manufacturers. Mark conceived and developed one of the industry's first multi-service provisioning platform and is multiple patent holder. He is active in the IEEE as a senior member. Mark received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Iowa State University and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.
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One Comment

  1. Anonymous
    May 31, 2011 at 6:54 AM

    Its great that they use

    fiberglass

    cable to increase the net speed 

Comments are closed