February 06, 2012, 3:06 PM — Google's grand fiber network experiment is now one step closer to becoming a reality as the company announced that it is "ready to lay fiber" in Kansas City, Kan.
In a post on the company's official Google Fiber Blog, Google Access general manager Kevin Lo said that the company had "come up with a comprehensive, detailed engineering plan" and was ready to start building out the network. Lo said that company's first task was to build a fiber backbone for the city that he said "will ultimately be carrying Kansas Citians' data at speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have today."
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Lo gave no timeline for when the backbone would be completed, nor did he say when Kansas City residents could expect to have the fiber network up and running to their homes and businesses.
Google first announced that it would be building its experimental fiber network in Kansas City about 10 months ago. Google has said that it wants the network to deliver download speeds of up to 1Gbps once it's completed and act as a model for how high-speed data networks can operate in the United States.
Last summer Google lit up a beta version of its fiber network in residential neighborhoods located near Stanford University in Palo Alto. The network has been free to use for students and faculty in the area for the past year, and users in the area have reported getting download speeds of 150Mbps and upload speeds of 90Mbps.
Google's fiber network has also inspired more than 29 universities to start up the new Gig.U initiative that aims to attract service providers to their communities to build out high-speed fiber networks that will deliver the same 1Gbps connectivity that residents and businesses in Kansas City will soon enjoy.
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