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<h1>Google Fiber provides faster Internet and, cities hope, business growth</h1>
<h3>
By <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/cecilia-kang/2011/02/28/ABFs9eL_page.html" rel="author">Cecilia Kang</a>, <span class="">Published: January 25</span>
</h3>
<p>KANSAS CITY, Kan. — Smack in the middle of the nation, this city is
about as far as possible from the hubs of high-tech innovation on both
coasts.</p>
<p>An effort last spring to excite new Web entrepreneurs in a place
better known for cattle drives and barbecue sauce turned up just a dozen
people.</p><p>Then <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/think-big-with-gig-our-experimental.html">Google</a> blew into <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-tech/post/kansas-city-kan-wins-googles-fiber-network/2011/03/30/AFKZ9W3B_blog.html">town</a>.</p>
<p>The
company, dominant in the virtual world, began digging actual holes in
the ground and connected homes and businesses to Internet speeds 100
times faster than most Americans have ever seen.</p><p>Three months into
Google’s much-publicized experiment, signs of new business life have
emerged. Nick Budidharma, an 18-year-old game developer, drove with his
parents from Hilton Head, S.C., to live in a “hacker home” that’s
connected to Google’s Fiber broadband network. Synthia Payne uprooted
from Denver and landed here to launch a start-up that aims to let
musicians jam real-time online. That sleepy weekly gathering for Web
entrepreneurs recently attracted a standing-room-only crowd of 260
businesspeople, investors and city officials.</p><p>Just as the move
from dial-up modems to higher-speed Internet connections helped launch
Netflix, Facebook and YouTube, policymakers and Google <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-tech/post/fcc-broadband-report-finds-many-gaps-thecircuit/2012/08/21/deeaadfe-eb83-11e1-9ddc-340d5efb1e9c_blog.html">hope</a> this next leap forward will breed a whole new slate of innovations.</p>
<p>The effort also is turning up the heat on <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/verizon-cable-company-deal-approved-by-justice-department/2012/08/16/ac24780c-e7c6-11e1-936a-b801f1abab19_story.html">cable companies</a>,
which now have to compete for consumers who can get faster speeds at
lower monthly costs. Those telecom companies have begun bidding against
Google to wire firms and city buildings with equally high-octane
Internet.</p><p>“What Google is providing is a catalyst. This
infrastructure is enormously important to create a ripple effect of
entrepreneurial activity,” said Lesa Mitchell, a vice president at the
Kauffman Foundation, a multibillion-dollar nonprofit that is trying to
help local start-ups and officials turn around this city.</p><p>It’s an
audacious and unproven experiment, the equivalent of replacing country
roads with the Autobahn speedway and then assuming Formula One race cars
will materialize. The <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-tech/post/googles-schmidt-says-google-fiber-a-real-business-for-the-company-thecircuit/2012/12/12/a8fb3290-448e-11e2-8061-253bccfc7532_blog.html">question is whether it is a curiosity </a>— a publicity stunt — or an example of what could happen around the country if more cities had access to such fast connections.</p>
<p>Some
privacy advocates also worry that the project raises questions about
how deeply Google will become entwined in its customers’ lives.</p><p>“It
gives them yet another way to gather and amass information about
people, to build their digital dossiers,” said John Simpson, director at
the public interest group Consumer Watchdog. “They have so much data
about users at their fingertips and become a magnet for government
request for that information.”</p><p>But local officials think those
lightning-fast Internet speeds, which allow movies to download in
seconds and create picture- and sound-perfect video conference calls,
will enable companies to operate more efficiently and use increased
computing power to create cutting-edge technologies.</p><p>The ripples
so far are small. About a dozen start-ups have launched in the first
neighborhood to get Google’s 1-gigabit-per-second service. Leading
economic indicators such as employment growth haven’t budged. There is a
frothy excitement, but even city officials who dub the region Silicon
Prairie admit it will be hard to measure how the new network will lead
to economic progress other than a general sense of activity.</p><p>“This
is exactly what we hoped would happen. More home-sprung businesses.
More competition. In that way, Google’s project is a success already,”
said Richard Usher, the assistant city manager for Kansas City, Mo. The
network was initially brought to neighborhoods on the Kansas side of the
city and will be in its first community on the other side of the state
line this spring.</p><p>Of course, Google has much to gain if the test
in Kansas City works. It won’t say how much it spent to build the
network, but it wants faster speeds so consumers will search more, put
more videos on YouTube and shift all e-mails and documents to its cloud
system of servers. By doing so, the company gathers more data to build
more complete portraits of users and boost its $37 billion business of
selling customized ads.</p><p>The company is taking small steps in other
regions, and this month began to offer free WiFi to the Chelsea
neighborhood of Manhattan. Its chief financial officer said in an
earnings conference call this week that the firm thinks its foray into
telecommunications is “not a hobby” and will be a real business.</p><p>For new entrepreneurs here, Google’s motives don’t matter. The faster and cheaper service opens up opportunities.</p><p>EyeVerify,
a security software firm, was in a part of the city where AT&T was
the only Internet service provider, offering maximum speeds of 5
megabits per second for $80 a month.</p><p>That turned the company’s
daily tests of its software into a hair-pulling exercise in patience.
The firm uses an individual’s unique eyeball vein patterns to secure
smartphones and other devices.</p><p>But sending files with thousands of
high-definition photos of eyeballs took hours to deliver and required
constant babysitting of outboxes to make sure files went through.</p><p>On
a recent afternoon, founder Toby Rush sat in the firm’s new office
space in Google’s Hanover Heights “fiberhood” and sent several of those
files within minutes.</p><p>He quickly uploaded large documents and videos on the cloud for his staff of 11 to access.</p><p>“This
allows us to spend time on things that are much more useful and
essential for the business to grow,” said Rush, one of hundreds of
residents and entrepreneurs who have signed up for Google’s service so
far.</p><p>Nearby on this former industrial strip in Hanover Heights, a
dozen other start-ups have taken refuge in Craftsman-style homes. All
connected to Google’s network, they call themselves Kansas City Startup
Village.</p><p>There is a “Home for Hackers,” donated by a local resident who lets entrepreneurs live and work there for free.</p><p>Investors
are showing greater interest, too. A microfinance investment firm
called Justine Petersen opened an office in the city last year with
hopes of investing more in the burgeoning tech community. The St.
Louis-based company is looking at creating another Home for Hackers.</p><p>“We see much untapped potential here. Google is the spark,” said Galen Gondolfi, a spokesman for Justine Petersen.</p><p>Such
opportunities have attracted start-up hopefuls such as Payne, who moved
from her home in Denver last month to live in the first hacker home.
Building her CyberJammer software requires massive amounts of bandwidth,
she said.</p><p>In order for a drummer in Germany to play with a
guitarist in Brazil, there can be no delay from slow Internet speeds.
Here, Payne is betting the software she develops with her 1 gigabit
connections will become the go-to place for musicians, though all will
need similar Internet speeds for it to work.</p><p>She shares the
bare-bones three-bedroom home with Budidharma, a recent high school
graduate who is trying to create software for servers running
multiplayer video games.</p><p>In his small bedroom with bunk beds
covered in race car bedsheets and a desk with two monitors and a server,
Nick pulls all-nighters coding and working with massive video files.
Anywhere else, he said, getting the bandwidth needed for his firm
LeetNode would be too expensive.</p><p>“It’s hard to develop a business
when you have to think about the cost of Internet and speeds,”
Budidharma said. “You don’t even have to consider it here.”</p><p>The hope is that these newcomers will drive the kind of economic growth the city seeks.</p><p>There
is debate over whether access to the Internet betters an economy.
Telecom operator Ericsson said in 2011 that doubling broadband speeds
increases gross domestic product by 0.3 percent. The Federal
Communications Commission has said areas that got broadband for the
first time experienced a creation of 2.6 jobs for every one job lost.</p><p>On the Missouri side of the state line, businesses are eagerly awaiting the new service.</p><p>When
T2 Studios sends its ultra high-definition videos, known as 4K video,
to television stations in Chicago and Los Angeles, it has to degrade the
quality for the files to transfer.</p><p>When Google’s network arrives
in this part of the city this spring, T2 could send its pixel-packed
videos in original form to clients.</p><p>The start-up buzz was on
display recently at the Kauffman Foundation’s weekly meeting of
start-ups, called “1 Million Cups.” Investors, city officials and
budding entrepreneurs lined up against the walls to hear pitches by two
start-ups.</p><p>City officials speculated that the Google project
motivated Time Warner Cable to bid for a contract to wire a new
city-sponsored start-up incubator in the old Union Station of Kansas
City, Mo., with 1 gigabit speeds.</p><p>“It was the first time I had heard from Time Warner in six years,” Usher said.</p><p>For residents here, Time Warner Cable provides speeds one-tenth of Google’s for about $5 more than Google’s $70 a month.</p>
<p>In
an e-mailed statement, Time Warner Cable said, “Kansas City has always
been a very competitive market. We are confident in our ability to
compete.”</p><p>That may be Google’s greatest early achievement. Its
project — even if it never broadens beyond Kansas City — has drawn fresh
attention to the problem of higher cable bills, poor customer service
and low speeds in many parts of the nation, local officials say.</p><p>“This
should make other mayors of cities very jealous and really make people
unhappy about the status quo of wired Internet access in their cities,”
said Susan Crawford, a former technology advisor to President Obama and
author of “<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300153139/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0300153139&linkCode=as2&tag=washingtonpost-20">Captive Audience</a>,” a new book on cable and phone monopolies.</p>
<p>“What this does is, for the first time, it allows people to question the status quo,” she said.</p><p>
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