Google will potentially expand municipal broadband coverage to 34 additional US cities.

Search giant Google is expanding its US municipal broadband project in a bid to become a number one American carrier. Excuse me while I roll my eyes.

Whenever Google comes out with considered one of its grand pronouncements, particularly on this area, i think compelled to chorus, “Here we go again.” Perhaps this time I’m being too cynical. Perhaps not.

A little bit of background: It has been four years since Google announced plans to get into municipal broadband services. After you have over 1,000 cities to reply eagerly to their initial invite early in 2010, the corporate started small, with rollouts of 1-gigabit Internet connections to homes in Kansas City, Kansas. Three years later, the trial started in Provo, Utah, and Austin, Texas.

That was almost it. Until this week, when Google announced it has reached out to 34 US cities to speak about bringing them one-gigabit fiber broadband.

The company described its plan in a blog by Milo Medin, VP of Google Access Services:

We’ve long believed that the Internet’s next chapter could be built on gigabit speeds, so it’s fantastic to peer this momentum. And now that we’ve learned a whole lot from our Google Fiber projects in Kansas City, Austin and Provo, we wish to help build more ultra-fast networks. So we’ve invited cities in nine metro areas round the U.S. — 34 cities altogether — to work with us to explore what it might take to bring them Google Fiber.

Read the remainder of this text on UBM’s Future Cities.

Mary Jander is managing editor of UBM’s Future Cities. Previously, she was executive editor of Internet Evolution, site editor of Byte and turn, and an established senior editor of sunshine Reading. She has spent over 27 years reporting and writing on information technology and … View Full Bio

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