Google has unveiled plans to build and trial ultra-high-speed broadband networks in a number of locations across the US.
The company has stated that fibre-to-the-home connections will initially be rolled out to between 50,000 and 500,000 people, and will give users a “choice of multiple service providers”.
Announcing the experiment, Google indicated that it was looking for developers to create bandwidth-intensive applications that would take advantage of the increased connection speeds.
“We’ll deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today with 1 gigabit per second, fibre-to-the-home connections,” wrote Minnie Ingersoll and James Kelly, Google product managers, in a company blog post.
Google has issued a request for information (RFI) to identify interested communities in the US. Reports suggest that Seattle (close to rival Microsoft’s Redmond headquarters) is one of the first cities to come forward.
The high-speed broadband trial is the latest example of Google growing its communications infrastructure. Late last year, the company unveiled a $400 million project to help lay undersea fibre-optic cables in Asia-Pacific, with the intention of increasing broadband speeds in the region up to 23 Tbps.
