Cable Industry News
Google gamble looks to upstage cable companies
Wednesday, 17, March 2010
No, Park City is not going to change its name to Google, like Topeka, Kan., did for a month.But Utah's premier ski town is the latest of dozens of U.S. communities hoping to persuade the Internet giant to build a high-speed fiber-optic network there that would deliver Internet 100 times faster than what most Americans now get from cable providers.For all the hoopla, however, the project remains mysterious. Among the curiosities is that Google has not been --- until now -- a company that provides such infrastructure. And details of the project remain vague.
For example, according to Google, the trial will serve somewhere between 50,000 and 500,000 users. And the final price for services has yet to be determined.Since Google's Feb. 10 announcement that it would build broadband fiber-optic networks in one or more locations across the country that would deliver 1 gigabit per second, cities from Palo Alto, Calif. to Blacksburg, Va. have rolled out the welcome mat.Utopia, the quasi-public agency involving 10 Utah cities already invested in fiber-optics, also has beckoned the search engine behemoth.
