At a press conference yesterday, Google announced that it was expanding its 1Gbps fiber-to-the-home testbed network. No longer limited to the citizens of Kansas City, Kansas, the company now plans to include Kansas City, Missouri—the 450,000-person city directly across the Kansas and Missouri River confluence that divides the states.
Kansas City, Missouri mayor Sly James was certainly pleased, and was on hand to make a shockingly hyperbolic statement: 'As a result of this announcement, we have become the most attractive city on the planet to entrepreneurs.'
There's general agreement that the fiber buildout means good things for the region as a whole. As a local op-ed put it yesterday, "The expansion means that both Kansas Citys now have bragging rights to being a first home for a high-profile product of one of the world’s hippest and best-known companies. That Google is launching a service expected to perform at 100 times the speed of current broadband services creates a positive buzz about our area."
The Missouri side of the buildout will be facilitated by the local utility, Kansas City Power & Light, which has signed its own deal with Google. That deal provides cash in exchange for Google's access to the electrical infrastructure, including poles and substations, to make deployment of its fiber fast and (relatively) inexpensive. KCP&L also announced that none of the money from the deal would go toward profits, but would all be plowed back into lowering electricity rates for customers.
The Kansas City Star, which had reporters in attendance at the press conference, noted that the delay in announcing the Missouri side of the buildout was largely due to the different structure of local utilities. On the Kansas side, the utility is publicly owned, which made for simpler negotiations; KCP&L is privately owned. Both cities should start to see active fiber service in the first quarter of 2012.
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