Google"s plan to offer a super fast Internet broadband service in Kansas City continues to make progress. This week the official Google Fiber blog site has announced that residents of the Midwest city "may notice a few engineers walking around, consulting maps and surveying your street or neighborhood." That means that Google has started the next phase of bringing a 1 Gbps Internet service to the people of both Kansas City, Missouri and Kansas City, Kansas.
According to the blog site, "The detail engineering phase will help us gather the geographical information we need to build the Google Fiber network later this year." It added, "You may also see these engineers counting or measuring telephone and utility poles. Their work may look a little strange to observers, but it will help us deploy Google Fiber to the community as quickly and efficiently as possible."
Google first announced back in March that Kansas City, Kansas had been selected for Google"s 1 Gbps broadband service after going through thousands of applications from US cities. In May, Google announced that the neighboring and larger city of Kansas City, Missouri would also benefit from its broadband project. The service is expected to go live for at least some of the city"s residents sometime in early 2012. So far Google has not announced what those citizens will have to pay to get the super fast broadband access.
In related news, Google has now launched a much smaller 1 Gbps service in Stanford, California. According to the Palo Alta Patch web site, the service has come only for some of the faculty and students who live around Stanford University. That project is considered to be a beta test for the much larger Kansas City project.