The roller coaster ride of Google Fiber appears to be on the upswing again, with the company “talking to city leaders” in Colorado, Nebraska, Nevada and Idaho, about markets for expansion, according to CEO Dinni Jain. Those 4 new states join Arizona, which was previously announced.
Jain said in a blog post that Google Fiber is building out in its existing markets and has begun connecting subscribers in West Des Moines, Iowa. Construction soon will begin in neighboring Des Moines.
Jain made the point that the world has caught up with the initial vision of Google Fiber, which was to provide Gigabit per second speeds to end users. The implication clearly was that the company was ahead of its time.
He also implied that the coming Google Fiber markets may go beyond the five states he mentioned, though the five will be the focus for the next several years.
“We’re thrilled to be expanding our geographic reach once again — bringing better internet to more people in more places,” wrote Jain in the blog post. “Stay tuned in the coming months as we fill in this picture with more details about our new cities, even faster speeds and redefined customer service.”
In June, David Finn, a director of corporate development for Google Fiber, said that the company has embraced the open access model for broadband. Finn, who made the comments at the Fiber Connect conference in Nashville, pointed to the West Des Moines project and its partnership with the public utility in Huntsville, Alabama as examples.
The Mesa project was announced last month. A city released request for information in January. This led to discussions with several network operations and to the creation of a “fiber optic network provider toolkit.” Google Fiber applied for and was granted a fiber license agreement to install conduit micro fiber using in city rights-of-way using micro-trenching techniques.
