Google Fiber May Come To Dallas
Taking its ongoing fight with AT&T and other incumbents to the next level, Google Fiber today stated the company is considering expanding into yet another sprawling urban market: Dallas. According to a Google Fiber blog post, the company says they’ve begun conversations with city leaders about bringing Google Fiber to the city, using a fiber ready checklist that ensures government leaders and regulations help, more than hurt, the process of broadband deployment.
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To be clear this is just early talks, and any real deployment of gigabit Google Fiber connections would be years away.
“Working alongside Mayor Mike Rawlings and local leaders, we’ll use our Fiber checklist to learn more about local topography, existing infrastructure, and other factors that may impact construction,” the company said of the news. “Building a fiber optic network through a dense and complex urban environment like Dallas is challenging—these discussions will help us deploy our network efficiently and responsibly.”
However long it takes, the announcement is good news for Dallas customers looking to benefit from the improvements real broadband competition generate.
The announcement of Dallas comes on the heels of similar, relatively ambiguous promises by Google Fiber to deploy services to increasingly larger markets like Los Angeles and Chicago. The fact that many of these major markets (including San Antonio and Atlanta) should see dramatic subscriber totals in a few years has many previously-skeptical Wall Street analysts rethinking their belief that Google Fiber is little more than an adorable PR experiment.
All told, Google Fiber’s total list of target markets is growing rather large, even though the slow speed of building networks from scratch means Google Fiber’s current subscriber totals remain relatively underwhelming. Users interested in updates about deployment progress can sign up via the Google Fiber website.
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