[Vision2020] Google Fiber provides faster Internet and, cities hope, business growth

[Art Deco]

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   Google Fiber provides faster Internet and, cities hope, business growth By
Cecilia Kang<http://www.washingtonpost.com/cecilia-kang/2011/02/28/ABFs9eL_page.html>,
Published: January 25

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.

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.

Then Google<http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/think-big-with-gig-our-experimental.html>blew
into
town<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-tech/post/kansas-city-kan-wins-googles-fiber-network/2011/03/30/AFKZ9W3B_blog.html>
.

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.

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.

Just as the move from dial-up modems to higher-speed Internet connections
helped launch Netflix, Facebook and YouTube, policymakers and Google
hope<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>this
next leap forward will breed a whole new slate of innovations.

The effort also is turning up the heat on cable
companies<http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/verizon-cable-company-deal-approved-by-justice-department/2012/08/16/ac24780c-e7c6-11e1-936a-b801f1abab19_story.html>,
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.

“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.

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 question is whether it is a curiosity
<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>—
a publicity stunt — or an example of what could happen around the country
if more cities had access to such fast connections.

Some privacy advocates also worry that the project raises questions about
how deeply Google will become entwined in its customers’ lives.

“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.”

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

For new entrepreneurs here, Google’s motives don’t matter. The faster and
cheaper service opens up opportunities.

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.

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.

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.

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.

He quickly uploaded large documents and videos on the cloud for his staff
of 11 to access.

“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.

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.

There is a “Home for Hackers,” donated by a local resident who lets
entrepreneurs live and work there for free.

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.

“We see much untapped potential here. Google is the spark,” said Galen
Gondolfi, a spokesman for Justine Petersen.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

The hope is that these newcomers will drive the kind of economic growth the
city seeks.

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.

On the Missouri side of the state line, businesses are eagerly awaiting the
new service.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“It was the first time I had heard from Time Warner in six years,” Usher
said.

For residents here, Time Warner Cable provides speeds one-tenth of Google’s
for about $5 more than Google’s $70 a month.

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.”

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.

“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 “Captive
Audience<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>,”
a new book on cable and phone monopolies.

“What this does is, for the first time, it allows people to question the
status quo,” she said.

* *

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-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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