Kansas City won this privilege over 1,100 other cities in March 2011. Since then, Google and the city have been surveying, planning, and eating "way too much barbecue," says Google's manager, Kevin Lo. Today, they start laying cable. A few months behind the Kansas side, neighbors on the other side of the river in Kansas City, Mo. will get the hook-up as well.

Fiber optic cable contains a bundle of glass fibers about the width of a human hair. The fastest Internet connection on record was established by researchers at the SuperComputing 2011 conference in Seattle. They were testing ways to share the enormous amounts of data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Center for Nuclear Research. That connection reached 186 gigabits per second. Google Fiber is just 1 gigabit.

That's not too shabby, though. Verizon's FiOS network, which is among the fastest commercially available in the U.S., gets only 150 megabits per second. Google Fiber will be almost 7 times faster than that.

How Will Kansas City's Fiber Work?

Kansas City won the Google Fiber competition because it met all of Google's various requirements. "Our goal was to find a location where we could build efficiently, make an impact on the community, and develop working partnerships with the local government, utility and community organizations," its FAQ says. "We believe we've found this in both Kansas City, Kansas and Kansas City, Missouri."

Lo says the network will use "thousands of miles" of cable. The backbone of the network will be built first, and then Google Fiber will be connected to homes around Kansas City. The cable work starts today after months of surveying and measuring, as well as some negotiations around how to use the city's utility poles.

The Kansas City Star reports that Google and the Kansas City Board of Public Utilities had some disagreement over how the network would be hung on the city's utility poles.

The Wyandotte County government wrote the plan with an unusual stipulation that Google would be allowed to hang its cables for free, using part of the poles typically reserved for utility companies to hang their own communication cables, not for third parties. Phone and cable companies typically use a lower part of the pole, and they pay a fee to do so.

The special installation for Google would also have required more specialized crews, so it would be more costly. The Star's source says that Google will opt to pay the regular fees like any third-party provider.

Google says the later stages of this experiment will reach over 500,000 people. Google has promised competitive prices for residential Internet service, but it hasn't been specific yet.

Why Is Google Becoming An ISP?

Google's not just doing this to collect Internet bills from homes. When the Internet gets faster, Google's whole business benefits. Google wants to test new, bandwidth-intensive "killer apps" to see what kinds of future services it can provide. But even for normal Web services, speed benefits Google. Put bluntly, the faster your Internet, the more Google ads you can see. That's why Google search and the Chrome browser are so dang fast.

Google refers to this Google Fiber project as an "experiment," so don't get too excited about 1-gigabit fiber in your neighborhood just yet (unless you're in Kansas City). But as Google said in its initial announcement, there are big implications for testing this out in the U.S. The country isn't even in the top 10 for average connection speed. Google wants to push U.S. Internet infrastructure forward.

As for Kansas City, with these kinds of speeds, there's sure to be a boom in next-generation Internet start-ups.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

Stephenson's remarks come as AT&T announced that it sold 9.4 million smartphones including 7.6 million iPhones in the the fourth quarter of 2011. AT&T has been crying about its spectrum paucity for several years now with the iPhone and other smartphones driving the company's desperation. See Stephenson's harsh message to the FCC below.

"The No. 1 issue for us, and the industry I believe, continues to be spectrum. This industry continues to see just explosive mobile broadband growth. It provides one of the few bright spots in the U.S. economy, but I think we all understand that this growth cannot continue without more spectrum being cleared and brought to market. Despite all the speeches from the FCC, we are still all waiting. The last significant spectrum auction was nearly five years ago now. This FCC has made it abundantly clear that they will not allow significant M&A to help bridge these delays in clearing up new spectrum. So, in absence of options, our company and others have taken the logical step to make smaller transactions to acquire the spectrum we need to meet demand.

"But, even here we need the FCC's action and leadership and unfortunately even the smallest and most routine spectrum deals are receiving intense scrutiny from this FCC, often times taking up to a year and sometimes longer for these to be approved.

"Now, I hope I am wrong but it appears the FCC is intent on picking winners and losers rather than letting the markets work. A lot of recent comments and speeches by certain members of this FCC suggest that they and not congress should decide how spectrum auctions are conducted including who can participate and what the conditions should be for participating. Meanwhile we pile more and more regulatory uncertainty on top of an industry that is the foundation for a lot of today's innovation, making it difficult for all of us to allocate and commit capital. In this industry we all know that capital investment equals jobs. So, the end result of this is that we have an industry that is just really stuck in creating real capacity.

"We will certainly do our part to provide leadership on these issues, but it is also clearly time for Congress and the FCC to step up. In the interim, this environment has clear implications for our business.

"First, while our overall spectrum position is competitive, we've led the way in mobile data. Therefore our utilization rates are running very hot and demand continues to accelerate. So, we will continue to do a number of things. In a capacity-constrained environment we will manage usage-based data plans, increased pricing and managing the speeds of the highest volume users. These are all logical and necessary steps to manage utilization. LTE deployment is also going to play a roll. We ended 2011 with 74 million LTE POPS covered and will accelerate that pace considerably in 2012, setting us up to complete deployment to 80% of the U.S. population in 2013. LTE does give us a 30%-40% lift in network efficiency, but at current growth rates that equates to only a year's growth in traffic. So, LTE is important but it is not the silver bullet in terms of capacity planning. What that means is that to meet customer demand we need to continue our spectrum push."

Note: Bold emphasis ReadWriteWeb.

What does this boil down to? AT&T says it needs more spectrum and is threatening the FCC that it will end up punishing users with data restrictions and higher prices if it does not get it. This message is relatively unchanged from the spin that AT&T used when trying to buy T-Mobile.

Stephenson also said that AT&T no longer has plans for rolling out rural broadband. The spread of broadband to the far-flung reaches of the country is a big goal of the Obama administration and the FCC. AT&T said that it would be able to reach near 99% of the country with broadband if it were allowed to purchase T-Mobile. Now, it has little strategy outside of of building up its LTE network across the country. At that, LTE still will only be available to 80% of the U.S. population on AT&T's network by 2013.

Note: This post has been updated to correct the spelling of Randall Stephenson.

AT&T spokesperson Seth Bloom confirmed the story, saying that customers will soon receive notices informing them of the changes to the company's terms of service. Bloom says that the new limits will involve overage charges, but these will only be billed to users who exceed their monthly caps more than three times. These overcharges are currently set at $10 for every 50 GB over the limit.

AT&T says that these caps are really just targeted at a small number of customers. According to the company, the average DSL customer uses around 18 GB a month, and so the new limits will only affect about 2% of its customers - those who AT&T says consume "a disproportionate amount of bandwidth."

While there's a marked difference between that average of 18 GB per month and the new cap of 150 GB, it's worth pointing out that our data consumption is rapidly accelerating across the board. Today's "average user" could quickly become tomorrow's "data hog." It seems likely that more and more people will inch their way towards that cap, particularly with video-streaming services like Netflix and video-game platforms like OnLive increasing in popularity and with cloud-based storage services like DropBox prompting us to upload our files for safe-keeping.

The move may be positioned as helping AT&T deliver "a great experience for all our Internet customers," but it's not clear that these actions are necessary to control congestion, and it raises questions about competition for broadband service as many areas still only have one DSL provider.

The most surprising thing in looking at the map? The reality that much of the country is not connected to broadband at all. But that was rather the point. The NTIA gives grants to projects in every state to increase the reach of broadband.

Areas of intense connection include the Eastern Seaboard, the Pacific Northwest, the Bay Area, the Chicago area and the Southland. The overwhelming majority of the Mountain West and Southwest, as well as inland Northwest and California are a broadband desert.

The map was built from 25 million documents that provided information on what kind of connections are available, who the providers are, where the connections are and what speed they operate at.

The site allows a user to analyze the data, browse the map or enter a specific location to see how connected it is. It also requests that users provide missing information, such as an unlisted broadband provider.

The APIs used to develop the map are all listed and developers are invited to use them.

The home page lists the top five locations that have been searched on.

• 38 w 45th st new york, ny 10036
• franklin mcpherson square
• 2 1st avenue, new york, ny
• 2017 mission street, san francisco, california
• ny

Other sources: PopSci

The plan will involve reshaping the Universal Service Fund, a decade-old subsidy which is paid for by fees added onto most consumers' phone bills. That money is then disitributed among phone companies to help subsidize the costs of providing services to rural areas.

Genachoswki says that the Universal Service Fund needs to be updated as it "was designed for a world with separate local and long-distance telephone companies, a world of traditional landline telephones before cellphones or Skype, a world without the Internet - a world that no longer exists."

Instead of subsidizing phone service directly, says Genachowski, we need to support broadband access, something that could in turn be used for telephony.

According to The New York Times, Genachowski rejects the idea put forward by some members of Congress to simply scrap the Universal Service Fund altogether. To do so, he says, "would let the broadband revolution bypass a substantial portion of the 24 million Americans who the commission says lack access to high-speed Internet connections."

The proposed changes address just one portion of the Universal Service Fund - the high-cost program which accounts for about 55T of the fund's annual disbursements. Other parts of the fund include the E-Rate program, which helps provide schools and libraries with broadband.

The report is based on data from a survey conducted in 2010 that looks at broadband usage in schools and libraries. The survey found that almost all respondents have some form of broadband connection to at least one facility. Just 2% use satellite and 3% use dial-up in order to access the Internet.

However, nearly 80% of all survey respondents say their broadband connections do not fully meet their current needs. 55% say that slow connection speed is the primary reason their needs aren't met. 39% says that cost of service is the major barrier to meeting their Internet needs. 27% cite installation costs as the barrier. Rural schools and libraries, in particular, struggle to provide adequate bandwidth to their users.

What Are E-Rate Recipients Using Broadband For?

Email tops the list of the most-used app by E-rate users. 98% of respondents say that's what Internet access is regularly used for and 69% say it's the most essential app. For libraries, online reference materials are the most important and most used app. 86% of library staff and patrons regularly use online reference materials, and 62% say it's the most essential tool they access online.

Schools and libraries both indicate that they see usage increasing. For example, 56% of all E-rate survey respondents say they plan on expanding their usage of digital textbooks in the next 2 years, and 45% say they plan to implement or expand their use of handheld devices for educational purposes. Currently, the average student-to-computer ratio of those schools responding to the survey is 5.86 to 1.

According to the FCC, this data will help the agency make better policy decisions for the E-rate program. The FCC has made better broadband access one of its major goals.

A report by analyst firm Mintel released this week claims that "Wi-Fi pirating" could be a main reason for the slow growth of broadband adoption over recent years.

"Home Internet penetration barely moved from 2006 to 2009. The slow growth in the era of Facebook, Pandora and YouTube shows that people are accessing the Internet from home through different methods, even if they haven't paid for access themselves," said Billy Hulkower, a senior analyst at Mintel. "Younger consumers appear especially likely to use a neighbor's Wi-Fi signal instead of subscribing at home as they are more likely to know how to find and connect to their neighbors' service."

Beyond these "young consumer", guess who else appear most likely to steal Wi-Fi - those households bringing in more than $75,000 a year.

As part of the same report, Mintel says it found that cell phones and mobile devices have more than doubled from 2005 to 2009 as methods for home Internet access, while dial-up still hangs on with just under 10% of the respondents.

Today, Google is announcing one such "white space" use - a broadband network.

Microsoft has done the same on its 500-acre Redmond, Washington campus, a feat that it says would have taken thousands of wi-fi routers and other equipment to replicate. These "white spaces" are the unused part of the broadcasting spectrum that were made available by the changeover to a digital signal. The Microsoft white spaces project used two transmitters to cover the entire campus.

According to Alder, the project is operating on an "experimental white spaces license". Next week, the Federal Communications Commission will be voting on "governing the white spaces - a vote that could pave the way for unlicensed white spaces deployments across the country."

The New York Times reported Sunday that the spectrum will be auctioned off, a similar approach used in the 2008 auction of the 700 MHz frequency band taken from its previous use for UHF TV signals. The majority of this auction will be allocated from federal spectrum, including that from agencies that is being underused or that could be shared with other services.

"We can use our American ingenuity to wring abundance from scarcity, by finding ways to use spectrum more efficiently," the memo says. "We can also unlock the value of otherwise underutilized spectrum and open new avenues for spectrum users to derive value through the development of advanced, situation-aware spectrum-sharing technologies."

It is encouraging to see the government take some further steps toward an improved wireless infrastructure, but the timeframe of the spectrum offering is somewhat disappointing. With the exponential growth of smartphone technology, who knows what kinds of things we'll be trying to do from our mobile phones in the next few years.

In the 2008 auction, Google lobbied to make portions of the spectrum open to use or rental by smaller independent providers. A similar debate could occur with this new spectrum that will be auctioned in the coming years. However, open access to the spectrum is not in the best interest of the major providers, like AT&T and Verizon, since more competition would undercut their subscriber bases.

Photos by Flickr users Rowdyman, and Jeff Kubina.

"Over the next five years digital technologies will progressively increase their impact across all segments of entertainment and media (E&M) as digital transformation continues to expand and escalate," a press release from PwC said Tuesday. "The uncertain economic background has done nothing to slow the pace of change, which has been far quicker than predicted 12 months ago. It is clear that the consumer is firmly in the driving seat of these changes."

According to the report, increased access to broadband has played a large role in helping boost online ad revenues. The Wall Street Journal reports that broadband penetration in the U.S. nearly doubled from 34% in 2005 to 64% in 2010 thanks partly to $7.2 billion in federal stimulus money put towards expanding broadband access. Additionally, PricewaterhouseCoopers expects that global consumer spending on Internet access will increase from $228 billion 2009 to $351 billion in 2014.

It was only a matter of time until online ad sales outpaced those of print, and once they do, they will only continue to gain momentum. Legacy media are driven by numbers and are slow to change their ways, and thus have not thrown their entire weight behind online initiatives. When the scales tip over to online advertising in the next year, those that have been reluctant to embrace new and online media will be forced to allocate additional resources to the winning market.

The ultimate demise of print media is still many years away, but it is pretty clear that ad revenues are slowly dropping away. It will take one of the predominant newspapers ceasing to print physical copies to set off the domino effect that will likely follow, but it is unlikely to happen any time soon. While newspaper ad revenues have been falling, they've been leveling out, and a balance between print and online is likely to exist for several years before print entirely fades away.

In order to get reliable statistics about the actual speeds that consumers are getting from the ISPs, the FCC announced a new initiative today that will place broadband speed measurement devices in the homes of 10,000 volunteers.

Measuring Broadband Speeds

To conduct this study, the FCC has partnered with SamKnows, a U.K.-based company that conducted a very similar study in Great Britain. Earlier this year, the FCC also launched Broadband.gov, a consumer-oriented site that features a set of broadband speed tests. With this new initiative, the FCC is looking to "develop more scientific and consistent broadband speed measures."

According to SamKnows, the device will download no more than 2GB per month and participants will be able to monitor their results in a Web-based dashboard.

Next Step: Mobile Broadband

In addition to these initiatives - which will flow into a new "State of Broadband" report later this year - the FCC is also looking for public input (PDF) on the best ways to measure mobile broadband speeds. As more and more of our Internet experience is shifting to the mobile Web, it only makes sense for the FCC to start looking into the performance of these networks. After all, how often do you really get the speeds that your mobile provider advertises? According to the FCC survey, only 33% of mobile Internet users in the U.S. are "very satisfied" with the speed of their mobile Internet connection.

As the report notes, the U.S. still boasts an environment that is highly conducive for information and communication technologies. The U.S. still ranks first when it comes to IT usage in business, and fourth for IT usage in government. On an individual level, however, the U.S. lags behind many other countries, mainly due to the low mobile subscription penetration rate - where the U.S. only ranks 72nd in the world - and the relatively low number of broadband subscribers (22nd). The report's authors base this assessment on information from 2008, however, and according to some data we saw earlier this year, broadband penetration in the U.S. was actually down in 2009.

China and India

China, which ranked at the bottom of the report's annual rankings in 2002 (64th out of 74 countries) has now moved up to 37th place (out of 133 countries). India, too, continues to climb up the the World Economic Forum's rankings and has now moved up to 43rd place.

The FCC's new apps allow users to test the speed of mobile broadband services and report deadzones where mobile broadband is not available. The FCC iPhone app is a free download from iTunes or the Android marketplace.

The Consumer Broadband Test and the Broadband Dead Zone Report are also available as fixed applications at Broadband.gov. According to the FCC, the Ookla, Inc. Speed Test and the Network Diagnostic Tool (NDT) running on the Measurement Lab (M-Lab) platform are used to power the app.

On the night of March 13th, the FCC tweeted that over 80,000 tests had been registered using the Broadband Speed Test. It was unclear how many tests were through Broadband.gov or the apps.

In the future, the FCC says it will making additional broadband testing applications available for consumer use. Consumers can also submit availability information by e-mail to fccinfo@fcc.gov. And, perhaps taking a page from Google's playbook, this application is in beta. According to the Consumer Broadband Test information page, "this beta version is the FCC's first attempt at providing Americans with real-time information about their broadband connection quality."

I ran a quick test on my home cable Internet connection.

My downlink isn't quite fiber optic speed, but I found it close to existing tools. The test depends upon Java, though many users are likely to have that installed at this point.

I tried out the mobile app as well, which used the GPS in my iPhone to discover my location. According to the FCC mobile broadband testing app, I'm getting 1.42 Mbps download speed from AT&T 3G here on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C., and .11 Mbps upload. My connection certainly beats GPRS, if not a Clearwire 4G connection — or my Wi-Fi.

Privacy Concerns?

The FCC states that it's "committed to protecting the personal privacy of consumers utilizing these tools, and will not publicly release any individual personal information gathered." It's posted a privacy statement to that effect.

Crowdsourcing Citizen Reporting

The larger context of the release of the FCC mobile broadband testing app is worth noting. The FCC will release its National Broadband Plan this week.

Part of that plan will certainly incorporate assessing where broadband service exists, how robust it is and how closely service matches advertised rates. An executive summary of the National Broadband plan is embedded below:

This kind of data collected by the FCC's broadband tests could serve in much the same vein as the FTC's consumer complaint assistant works at FTComplaintassistant.gov. By releasing the apps and test at Broadband.gov, the FCC has given citizens a tool to report service quality and availability around the country. Equipped with that data, commissioners may be able to make policy decisions informed by data as they roll out the national broadband plan.

Guest author Alexander B. Howard (@digiphile) will be reporting live from the upcoming Gov2.0 Summit in Washington, D.C., on September 7-8.

So, we were quite excited to learn this evening of a new proposal that would give New Zealanders - including a couple RWW staff members - a better broadband experience. According to NZ website Stuff, a halndful of well-known innovators and entrepreneurs are teaming up on a $900 million dollar project that would give Kiwis (and their Aussie neighbors) "virtually unlimited" broadband access via an international cable that would run across the Pacific Ocean. Just how much of a difference would this cable make compared to current Internet access?

The plan is to construct a 5.12 Terabits per second-capacity fiber cable to connect Australia and New Zealand to the U.S. - a cable that would deliver data at five times the speed of the current network.

This proposal puts Warehouse founder Stephen Tindall, TradeMe creator Sam Morgan, entrepreneur Rod Drury, and techies Mark Rushworth, John Humphrey and Lance Wiggs in competition head-to-head with Southern Cross Cable, a large network partially owned by Telecom New Zealand. The team, called Pacific Fibre, hopes to complete the project by 2013.

Of course, the next step is figuring out the exact cost of the proposed cable - the group thinks $900M might be a highball figure - and find investors. However, as Tindall eloquently noted, you have to spend money to make money - something anyone with an interest in NZ's economic future and global competitiveness must consider.

"The New Zealand Institute identified billions of dollars in economic potential by unleashing the Internet," he said, "and it is beyond time to address the issue. This is necessary and basic infrastructure - we must decrease the distance between New Zealand and the international markets.

"Doing so will be incredibly valuable for New Zealand and Australian businesses and consumers. If we are able to deliver on this cable this it could be as valuable to our NZ economy as the quantum leap refrigerated ships were to our export trade many years ago."

How feasible do you think this project will be? Is 2013 a realistic time table? And where do you think Pacific Fibre's investors will be found? Let us know your opinions in the comments.

According to today's announcement, Google plans to offer these connections at "competitive prices" and wants the networks to be open to competitors. Google current operates a free WiFi network in its hometown of Mountain View.

Finding Killer Apps

According to Google, this effort will help the company to experiment with "new ways to help make Internet access better and faster for everyone." Specifically, Google wants to see what the "killer apps" for these kind of connections are and test how to build better fiber networks.

U.S. is Lagging Behind - Will this Help?

The U.S. has been lagging behind with regards too broadband speeds and adoption. Just last year, the average broadband speed in the U.S. actually declined. With Chrome and the Chrome OS, Google has recently tackled a number of problems where it feels like the company is more interested in pushing technology forward than becoming a market leader. Nobody has really pushed broadband speeds in the U.S. forward and given that there are a lot of places where the incumbent cable providers don't even have competition, there has been relatively little incentive for these ISPs to provide higher speeds.