Forget that Google Fiber went down in Kansas City during the World Series last night, the service is speedy as all hell.
Today, the Fiber team announced the exploration of 3 new locations: Oklahoma City, Jacksonville and Tampa:
We’re inviting Oklahoma City, OK, Jacksonville, FL and Tampa, FL, to explore bringing Google Fiber to their communities, as we did last month with three other cities. These growing tech-hubs have a strong entrepreneurial spirit and commitment to small business growth. Their list of accolades is long—from Jacksonville’s title as a top 10 city for tech jobs, to Tampa Bay’s #2 spot on the list of best cities for young entrepreneurs, to Oklahoma City’s recognition as the #1 city to launch a business. One of our goals is to make sure speed isn’t an accidental ceiling for how people and businesses use the Web, and these cities are the perfect places to show what’s possible with gigabit Internet.
“Explore” means that the cities themselves will work with Google to see if they can meet the demands of what installation requires. It’s not like Google strolls in and flips a switch, it’s quite a process. I learned about it while visiting Kansas and Kansas City and both towns had to fill out a huge form with crazy questions about how they could possibly support Google in the endeavour. It worked out for them (other than last night).
The invitation is a good indication of potential acceptance since Google clearly does their homework before publicly inviting these cities into the club. The team says “the more we learn about a city, the smoother our construction efforts will be.” Once it collects the information, Google Fiber makes a decision whether to move forward.
There’s an actual checklist for cities, which you can view here.
Last month, the company invited Irvine, CA, Louisville, KY, and San Diego, CA to explore bringing Fiber to their cities.
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