Chapel Hill and Carrboro could receive Google fiber network

By KATIE BARBEE | The Daily Tar Heel

Updated: December 7, 2010, 3:25 PM

With the holidays approaching, Chapel Hill and Carrboro could receive the gift of a new high-speed Internet network.

Google announced plans in February to select a small number of locations nationwide to test a new fiber network, which the company claims will be more than 100 times faster than what most residents currently use.

Google spokesman Dan Martin said the company is close to completing their selection process and will announce the trial locations by the end of the year.

Martin said the new Internet speeds will be delivered via a 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connection.

Chapel Hill and Carrboro are among approximately 1,100 communities that have applied to become home to the new network.

“We’re interested in deploying our network efficiently and quickly,” Martin said. “And we are hoping to identify interested communities that will work with us to achieve this goal.”

Martin said Google will identify “one or more” communities in which the trial network will reach at least 50,000 people and as many as 500,000 people.

Chapel Hill Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt said he is hopeful that the town will be chosen.

“Chapel Hill and Carrboro make up the kind of community where Google could demonstrate some success quickly,” he said. “There was a lot of community and University support for the application and a great deal of enthusiasm for the effort.”

Chapel Hill resident Brian Russell created a Facebook group following Google’s announcement to garner support for the fiber. The page has recruited nearly 1,900 members since its creation.

Russell said schools and libraries in particular could benefit from the new network.

“Fiber speeds could make it possible to do so much more,” he said, “like high-quality, two-way video and guaranteed high speeds to individual classrooms and students.”

Russell also said the local economy could prosper with the help of Google’s fiber.

“The biggest need of businesses now is access to capital,” Russell said. “High speed fiber broadband could help local businesses greatly expand their markets by allowing them to sell to the world.”

Kleinschmidt said regardless of Google’s decision, he thinks the town’s active support will fuel future advancements.

“Even if we don’t ultimately receive the attention from Google, I think it helps move our community forward to the day where we can provide that type of technology.”

Contact the City Editor at city@dailytarheel.com

Ann Arbor holds out hope for fiber optic broadband

Thursday, December 09, 2010

Donna Donowitz
Brafton

In March, Google announced plans to install a high-speed fiber optic network in one or two communities in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Soon after the announcement, community organizers in Ann Arbor began a campaign to publicize the development and bring it to fruition, AnnArbor.com reports.

The efforts included the launching of a website, A2Fiber.com, to support the campaign.

Some communities ran their own campaigns. Officials in Pittsfield and Saline publicized their efforts on Facebook and Twitter in hopes of winning the high-speed, fiber optic network.

Tom Crawford, Ann Arbor’s CIO, dismissed complaints that Google's efforts ran counter to Ann Arbor’s. “I don’t see it as negative or positive ... My understanding is they believe that something good in this region is good for all of us.

I think Pittsfield and Saline believe the same thing. It’s just a different way of saying the same thing," he said.

About 1,100 communities applied to the contest and Google said it planned to announce the winners by the end of the year. However, the company has not yet made its selections. Google spokesman Jake Parrillo said the winners might be announced in January 2011, due to the number of applicants.

"The goal is still to get it out before the end of the year, but it may be some time early next year," Parrillo said. "We don’t want it to slip too far, but the number of applicants and the number of quality applicants overwhelmed us. It’s great."

Ann Arbor is still campaigning for the network, despite the delay. Derek Mehraban, CEO of Ingenex Digital Marketing, which is based in Ann Arbor, plans to distribute bumper stickers reading "I’d rather be traveling at 1 gigabyte per second.” The stickers reference the top speed of Google’s fiber optic cable networks, which registers internet speeds of up to 100 times faster than that found in an average U.S. home.

Google has not announced the exact criteria it will use to make its decision, though the company said it intends to study how the communities use the faster network speeds to increase innovation and mobile software applications use.

While Ann Arbor’s fiber optic network is still in the works, Google has expanded elsewhere. Recently, Google launched a test network at Stanford University, where faculty and university employees will be able to use the high-speed broadband.

Charitable Social Networking Site Jumo Gets Overloaded with Users on Day One

By Beecher Tuttle

TMCnet Contributor

On Tuesday, Facebook (News - Alert) co-founder Chris Hughes launched the beta version of Jumo, an innovative social networking site that connects donors with charities. The good news for the non-profit company is that the website garnered an unbelievable amount of initial consumer interest. The bad news, so many users tried to access the site it nearly crashed just a few hours after being launched.

Apparently, the unexpected number of people who tried to log on to Jumo caused what the company referred to as "load-related issues," according to Information Week. Users reported experiencing major delays while trying to sign up for the social networking site and had trouble with connection speeds once they finally were able to log in.

Hughes (News - Alert) took the issue in stride, referring to the crash on his Twitter account as a good problem to have.

"While we anticipated great interest, we've seen an unbelievable response from people in countries around the world," Jumo officials wrote in a company blog. "This is beyond our wildest dreams."

Not surprisingly, Jumo is set up in a very similar way to Facebook. In fact, the website requires that people sign in to their account using the Facebook ID.

Once logged in to Jumo, users can choose to "follow" and support as many as 3,500 causes and organizations, Business Review reports. Each page includes news articles, blog posts, YouTube (News - Alert) videos and outlets for users to offer their feedback and share content with their friends. The website also aggregates an organization's posts from various social media sites, including Twitter, Flickr and Facebook, into one repository.

"Our real mission is to make it as easy as possible for people to be able to find these organizations and then connect with them in a substantive way," said Hughes.

He added that anyone can create a page for a given cause, but organizations will need to be vetted by the IRS to receive donations via Jumo.

As of last check, the website was still experiencing delays.

Beecher Tuttle is a TMCnet contributor. He has extensive experience writing and editing for print publications and online news websites. He has specialized in a variety of industries, including health care technology, politics and education. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Tammy Wolf

Google Ultra-High Speed Broadband Closer to Reality

October 26, 2010 By Lauren Katims

Google is one step closer to implementing its ultra-high speed broadband network in select communities across the United States.

The Web search giant announced last week on its official blog that Stanford University in Northern California will serve as the beta test site for the network before expanding the Internet service to at least one more community elsewhere.

Stanford’s residential subdivision, a group of approximately 850 faculty- and staff-owned homes on campus, will be the first to experiment with Google’s Fiber for Communities project, which began earlier this year. The goal is to implement 1 Gbps fiber Internet — a service that’s 100 times faster than what’s typically available in America — to target communities across the country.

Google spokesman Dan Martin said the company chose Stanford for three reasons: the university’s openness to experimenting with new fiber technologies; the layout and small size of the residential neighborhoods; and its location just a few miles up the road from Google, which will make it easier for engineers to monitor progress.

After beta testing is done, Google hopes to eventually serve 50,000 to 500,000 people in other communities, which earlier this year were asked to state their case for why Google should mark their city on its map.

Among the most creative endeavors of the 1,100 responses: mayors swimming with sharks, cities changing their names and others creating spoof videos for YouTube.

“We were excited to see that kind of enthusiasm. There’s a real hunger for better and faster Internet access,” Martin said. Google hasn’t made any decisions yet, he said, but plans to announce a decision by the end of this year.

Local resources will play a major role in which communities are chosen. Some factors include level of community support, weather conditions, approved construction methods, and broadband availability and speeds that are already offered to users within a community.

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