Google have posted a new signup page page for a big announcement called Google Fiber. Those internet historians will know that Google has owned a large volume of dark fibre for years now. It looks like the time is right to light up that fiber. On July 26th 2012, aka tomorrow, Google will Live Stream the announcement on YouTube.
When visiting the link provided, the title of the YouTube video is “Google Fiber Announcement in Kansas City, July 2012”. The description of the video is a very intriguing “Google will make a special announcement about Google Fiber and the next chapter of the Internet.”
It will be interesting to see just how aggressive Google will be with this announcement. They have already run trials in Kansas city of connections at one gigabit per second speeds. A company of Google’s size could potentially create an ISP branch and deliver ultra high speed connections to a large % of the population. Of course the could simply continue to build out infrastructure and services using the fiber, but a consumer facing announcement located in Kansas city indicates something much more interesting..
Google’s business grows with more people join the internet, so it makes sense that Google would begin to solve the connectivity issues of America. As more users connect at faster speeds, they access more services more often, hence the investment in fiber. The exciting part about Google offering internet services is that their motivations are different than traditional ISPs and can provide different pricing models.
We wait with anticipation, until then, go signup at https://fiber.google.com/savethedate. It is also worth heading to http://googlefiberblog.blogspot.com.au/ for a history of Google’s fiber announcements.
