It’s unclear when the testing would begin, but Google said in the FCC filing that it would initially test in Atwater, California, Mountain View, California, Palo Alto, California, San Bruno, California, San Francisco, California, San Jose, California, Boulder, Colorado, Kansas City, Kansas, Omaha, Nebraska, Raleigh, North Carolina, Provo, Utah, and Reston, Virginia.
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Meanwhile, the latest developments have surprised civic officials, who’ve been in talks with Google all this while about the company’s grand plans of bringing super high-speed internet to their cities. Nearly 100 employees set to install Google Fiber in San Jose last month were informed of the delay and offered transfers to work on an unrelated project in San Diego.
“We were upset and wanted to know what happened”, said Salvador Bustamote, a fibre optic installer, in Monday’s report.
Fiber, a division of Google parent Alphabet, is striving to bring Internet speeds of one gigabit per second to cities around the country, but progress has been slow. The Webpass purchase is expected to be completed this summer.
Google Fiber recently announced plans to purchase Webpass, a company that uses point-to-point wireless technology to offer speeds up to 1Gbps, the same as Google’s fiber-to-the-home network.
Digging up city streets to run cable underground is time-consuming and costly. An unnamed source cited by Mercury News claimed that Google is assessing the use of mmWave as a cheaper alternative to fibre. Google’s acquisition of wireless internet startup Webpass is helping the company expand the service, according to Bloomberg.
Google has put its Silicon Valley fibre rollout on hold as it considers deploying point-to-point wireless infrastructure instead.
Google Fiber will delay plans to deploy gigabit fiber-to-the-home in the San Jose, California area, reports local media outlet San Jose Mercury News. “They said that Google was going to re-evaluate this whole project because they were thinking of going aerial”.
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Some analysts see the delays as indications that Google Fiber is more strategy than product – an attempt to get competitors, cities and other service providers to install fiber networks that would foster faster and more widespread consumption of Google’s online offerings. If, however, it turns out that new technologies or combinations thereof enable faster and less expensive gigabyte internet rollouts, many more cities could benefit.
