Building a gigabit network is unfortunately not a fast proposition. It takes time and money to dig trenches or string fiber. But in an op-ed over at Ars Technica, the CEO of Wicked Broadband in Lawrence, Kansas suggests that if Google really wanted to drive broadband competition and gigabit networks it would teach cities how Google thinks about the problem and costs of building fiber.
My wife and I run a small ISP here in Lawrence. Customers who live near our fiber are already getting gigabit service and, in partnership with our city government, we are looking at installing a common carriage gigabit system in residential neighborhoods throughout Lawrence. Most of the rest of the country isn’t that lucky. A vast majority of US households have no ultra-high-speed providers (defined as ISPs that can deliver 1 gigabit per second), and even traditional broadband choices (which usually end up being less than 10 megabits per second) are limited to the incumbent phone or cable provider.
