Today, we bring you a two-pack of Gig Bits — nearly as refreshing and considerably lower in calories than these Gigabits.
Following Google’s announcement last Monday via its Fiber Blog that “Kansas City is Fiber-ready,” Silicon Prairie News reached out to the Mountain View, Calif.-based search and advertising giant for additional details about the timeline for the implementation of its ultra high-speed network in the Kansas City area.
The specifics of that timeline are TBD — or, at least, TBA.
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“We’re building infrastructure, and so I guess the next step will be when we release all of our marketing and pricing details; that will kind of be our next big milestone,” Google Fiber spokesperson Jenna Wandres said in a phone call Friday. “But we’re still probably a couple months away from that.”
Wandres confirmed that Google has about 100 people on the ground in the Kansas City area, most of them on truck crews working to run the fiber between utility poles. “As we start to do Fiber to the home connections,” Wandres said, “we’re going to be hiring a lot more people.”
Crews are working on both sides of State Line Road at the moment, but Wandres said the order in which neighborhoods are receiving the infrastructure for the Fiber network isn’t indicative of the order in which Google’s one-gigabit service will be activated. The company doesn’t plan to release that information, she said, until potential customers can act upon it.
“We don’t have anything yet in terms of neighborhood selection,” Wandres said.
“We’re building an infrastructure base right now.”
This carrot’s high in Fiber
The Kansas City Business Journal‘s Alyson Raletz has reported twice over the last two weeks about the sizable carrot that Google Fiber has provided for companies interested in increasing their presence in the Kansas City area.
On Feb. 1, TurnKey Internet, a web hosting company based in Albany, N.Y., announced its acquisition of North Kansas City-based internet service provider KCNet, citing the impending arrival of ultra-fast uploads and downloads as a factor in the purchase.
“We got really interested because our product excels as you get more and more speed to the business premises,” TurnKey CEO Adam Willis said. “We can’t live selling our products to people who don’t have high-speed Internet.”
A story published Friday by the Business Journal said that Des Moines-based LightEdge Solutions had inked a three-year lease for a Kansas City office space, with plans to add six new employees to its existing Kansas City workforce of four. Fiber was a factor in the equation, according to the Business Journal article:
The company, which needs a lot of bandwidth to provide managed IT and cloud computing services, identified Kansas City because of the 1-gigabit broadband network Google is building in Kansas City and Kansas City, Kan., and because of its proximity to LightEdge’s Iowa headquarters.
Image credits: Photo by Amber Case via Flickr.
Gig Bits is an occasional feature that provides a rundown of the latest newsworthy nuggets related to the Google Fiber project in the Kansas City area.
