Google Announces Gigabit Fiber Installation Winner

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And somewhere, a thousand cities breathed a heartfelt, sorrowful sigh of ennui and turned back to their ten to twenty meg connections, just a little worse off than they were. The announcement has been made, and everybody but Kansas City (Kansas City, Kansas–not Kansas City, Missouri) is feeling a little worse right now, because Kansas City is the ones who’ll get the first round of gigabit fiber from Google.

What this means is that, soon, Kansas City will be jammed full of telecommuters, BitTorrent leeches, and commuters desperately searching for a wi-fi connection to get onto the fattest pipes the world has ever known. Projections say that the whole thing will come online by 2012, which probably already has Kansas City folks buying new PCs to get ready for the day when they will conquer Azeroth and name it the World of Kansas City.

But if you were one of the cities, towns, and villages who missed out on the fat new connection, don’t twist your cat-5 into a noose just yet, because according to word from Google, Kansas City will not be the last place to get the gigabit fiber, rather only the first.

And this is a development that will no doubt shake the world of telecommunications as we know it. Chances are good the major providers are already shaking in their boots, because there’s a fair chance they’ve lost all their business in Kansas City, especially if Google’s prices are even remotely comparable–who would stick with a ten meg per second connection when a service fully 100 times faster is available at a similar price? Google could charge a 10-20 percent premium (or more!) and would still have people sign up faster than they could hand out flyers, especially if the bandwidth caps aren’t too egregious.

Many of the current developments we watch right here–online gaming, streaming video, music–depend on fat, open bandwidth pipes, and Google’s development may open the floodgates. Those who don’t keep up–Comcast, I’m looking at you–will likely be lost in the shuffle.