The National WWI Museum and Memorial has been a Google Fiber Community Connection since 2014. Recently, they asked if we could upgrade them to our new 5 Gig service to help support their activities during a big onsite event. . .and they decided they liked it so much that they wanted to keep it as a paying customer! In advance of Memorial Day, we’re happy to share a guest post from their Vice President of Facilities, Operations Management and Technology, Chris Wyche, on how they are putting that speed to use to help further their mission of remembrance and education. 

The Liberty Memorial Tower is one of the most recognizable landmarks in the Kansas City skyline. In 1918, weeks after the Armistice ended fighting on the Western Front, Kansas City leaders coalesced around the need to build a lasting monument for those who served in The Great War. So, in 1919 the Liberty Memorial Association was founded. In just 10 days, $2.5 million was raised – the equivalent of $40 million today – and the National WWI Museum and Memorial was born. 

Over the last several decades the Museum and Memorial has experienced exponential growth in service to our mission: to remember, interpret and understand The Great War (known today as World War I) and its enduring impact on the global community. 

• 1998: Kansas Citians voiced their support for the Liberty Memorial Tower and their interest in expanding the site by building a museum beneath the Tower.

• 2004: The Museum and Memorial was designated by Congress as the nation’s official World War I Museum.

• 2006: In September, the site was designated a National Historic Landmark and the National WWI Museum and Memorial opened to international acclaim.

Although the Museum and Memorial’s mission is rooted in reverence for the past, part of my job is to ensure we’re consistently looking to the future, finding avenues to better serve our visitors and the community. 

As such, when Google Fiber brought high-speed internet service to Kansas City more than 10 years ago, we jumped at the opportunity to work with this innovative company. Now, we’ve been a Google Fiber Community Connection for almost a decade. Google Fiber’s service allows us to bring best-in-class, interactive digital experiences to each of our visitors each year; it also ensures we’re prepared when significant milestones occur. 

In April we experienced one of those milestones, the 2023 NFL Draft, in which the Museum and Memorial played an integral role. With hundreds of thousands of fans descending on and around our grounds, we knew both internet access and speed were of critical importance. Therefore, we reached out to our longstanding internet service provider, Google Fiber, to identify solutions to help prepare us for the influx of people and technology needs. They jumped into action and determined more bandwidth was the answer. We became the first institution in Kansas City to use Google Fiber’s 5 Gig service. Our teams got to work on the technical aspects of the upgrades: a new firewall, new fiber installed inside and outside, and 20 new wireless access points. This joint effort enabled us to provide reliable, fast connectivity, not only to the on-site NFL staff, but also to our Museum and Memorial guests. 

It's not just NFL fans who travel far and wide to experience our grounds, every year visitors from around the world come to the Museum and Memorial to immerse themselves in history. However, we know not everyone is able to visit us in person, therefore, it is core to our mission that we harness the power of digitization to share our resources and history with a global audience. Now, our team is in the process of digitizing our entire collection, with three-dimensional objects soon to come, making everything accessible through our Online Connections Database. Google Fiber’s reliability, and even faster upload and download speeds with our new 5 Gig service, has been critical in this process. This enhanced connectivity will continue to benefit our guests for years to come.

These upgrades are also critical to our annual Memorial Day Celebrations, which we anticipate will be tremendously successful. 

We have many new, exciting exhibits debuting this summer:  

• The Entertaining the Troops exhibit provides a glimpse into the life of a WWI soldier beyond the battlefield. 

• The Bergman Family Gallery and Open Storage Center debuted earlier this month, offering a unique opportunity to view objects and artifacts that were otherwise unavailable to visitors. 

• On June 8, Bespoke Bodies: The Design & Craft of Prosthetics opens to the public. This exhibit explores the past, present, and future of prosthetics design, with stories from professional athletes, veterans, children, and more. 

We invite you to visit us. We’re confident you will feel inspired by this unique, historical landmark in Kansas City, and learn something new about those who served in World War I, performing their duty with courage, patriotism, sacrifice, and honor.

Posted by Chris Wyche, National WWI Museum and Memorial, Vice President of Facilities, Operations Management and Technology

Our West team has been busy — next up, we’re happy to share that Logan, Utah, will become a Google Fiber city.

We’ve signed a license agreement with the City of Logan, our northernmost Utah city to date (also about halfway between Pocatello and Salt Lake City) which will allow us to begin the planning process for bringing a high speed fiber-to-the home network to residents. We expect to start construction later this year and begin offering service in Logan in 2024. Logan residents who want to stay up-to-date on our progress in Logan can sign up here.

The Utah team is continuing to build out our network along the Wasatch Front. With Logan, we’re working to extend our network further north in Utah and bridge our new cities in Idaho as well. 

Posted by Silvia Castro, Head of Government & Community Affairs, Utah & Idaho

Last fall, Dinni told you that I was testing our 20 Gig product in my home. Yes, I have the speed test to prove it, but to be honest, my household can’t really test the limits of what that much internet speed can do. We tried — we streamed as many World Cup games in 4K as we had devices, but we didn’t even come close to using it all.

That’s why we launched a test with our friends at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and they’ve been doing a lot of things at their School of Science and Engineering from tackling big data sets to making virtual reality less virtual and more reality (more on that soon — stay tuned).

But we know that’s just the beginning (like our recently launched 5 Gig and 8 Gig products). That’s why we’re looking for eight more organizations  — businesses, non-profits, educational institutions — to help test 20 Gig in Austin, Huntsville, Raleigh-Durham and Salt Lake City.

So what makes your organization or company a good candidate to test a symmetrical 20 Gig connection?

• You’re downloading or uploading massive datasets
• You're conducting research that really needs significantly more bandwidth 
• You tell us! — You’re working on some future-focused technology we haven’t even heard of, but it needs a lot of bandwidth

If that sounds right, let us know here that you are ready to give REALLY, REALLY, (okay, one more REALLY) fast internet a try.

Posted by Nick Saporito, Head of Multi-gig & Commercial Product

Today, we’re introducing you to one of our Community Foundation of Huntsville’s Digital Inclusion Fund grant recipients, Fantasy Playhouse Children’s Theater and Academy, a Alabama based nonprofit that uses the theater to help kids develop real world skills. Karen Mockensturm, Executive Director, shares how they’re implementing technical theater and performing arts training for local youth with Google Fiber’s support for their tech theatre lab. 

At Fantasy Playhouse Children’s Theater and Academy (FPCTA), we teach life skills through stage skills. It’s our goal that every child who walks through our doors leaves empowered to be an advocate for themself and feels inspired to tell their own story.

This mission started at an unusual time. As you may know, Huntsville is also known as “Rocket City” due to the development of the, yes, rockets in our city that put the first people on the moon. In accordance with this fact, FPCTA was founded in 1961 — the same time our city population was massively expanding due to a large influx of people supporting the aerospace and scientific communities. 

This was part of a major expansion of Huntsville’s arts community. Along with FPCTA, the Huntsville Ballet was founded; the Huntsville Arts Museum had a major expansion; the Youth Symphony was founded; and our Huntsville Symphony went professional. Simply put: This was a time when our region was majorly defining its arts and culture landscape.

Since then, we’ve had more than a million people come through our doors. Today we serve as a gateway for children’s theatre and professional culture arts in the area, at this point serving around 31,000 people a year. 

For the most part that means teaching performing arts skills, but there’s always been an element of technical theater that permeates what we do. Through our eight-person-space STEAM Lab, we teach the foundations and the intricacies of lighting design, audio engineering, set design, props making, costume design, and more. 

This is why we’re incredibly excited that the Google Fiber Digital Inclusion grant has supported us to launch our tech theater lab which is key to preparing today's students for pre-advanced manufacturing, audio engineering and other creative industry careers. This is the pilot program for a part of our planned capital expansion which includes a 100% accessible, 35,700 square foot theatre arts campus. This brand new facility will feature a new 355 seat theater, a flexible black box space, classroom spaces, a dance studio — and a full tech lab, including separate film and music studios.

I was hired in 2012 as Executive Director with the charge of making sure that our organization would move smoothly into the next iteration of our long-term legacy. In knowing we have support through so many channels and seeing our theater step into a bigger pair of shoes, I know we’re well on our way to accomplishing exactly that.

Posted by Karen Mockensturm, Executive Director, Fantasy Playhouse Children’s Theater and Academy

Even in the digital age, libraries continue to serve the central function of connecting many in our communities to the larger world. Today, Shawn Bakker, President of Nashville Public Library Foundation shares how the organization brings additional resources to help serve the library’s clients in new ways, including expanding digital equity across Nashville. 

In the library of the 21st century, books are only half the story. Today’s community library is an agile information hub for personal empowerment, continuously adapting to meet the needs of its patrons and the rapidly changing circumstances of our society. Government funding pays for staff, books and buildings, but the programs that make Nashville Public Library a community jewel require more support than is available in public funds. The Nashville Public Library Foundation (NPLF) provides that bridge.

Since its creation in 1997, the Nashville Public Library Foundation, has raised over $65 million, from individuals and organizations, to advance the impact and reach of Nashville Public Library programs and initiatives that exist beyond the budget of Metro government. Gifts to the Foundation ignite a world of opportunity and access for people of all ages through investment in library resources that build literacy, digital skills, workforce readiness, lifelong learning and ultimately, create better lives. Support from NPLF enables the library to build robust programs, and pivot when circumstances require.  

We are especially proud of our partnerships with community pillars, like Google Fiber, whose values align with ours and whose generosity helps NPL meet the growing needs of Nashvillians.   Google Fiber’s investment in the Foundation is enabling life-changing initiatives like NPL’s Digital Inclusion program.

Digital inclusion refers to the work necessary to ensure that all communities, especially those with the most barriers to access, have the tools needed to thrive in our modern, internet-based society. This includes not only access to hardware, software and the internet, but also the knowledge and support to effectively use those resources. Put simply: digital divide is the problem. Digital equity is the goal. Digital inclusion is the pathway.  

Nashville Public Library is a central hub for this work in our community, and many of its programs are aimed toward seniors, who often have the greatest need.  NPL’s Digital Inclusion program offers in person training to adults at branches, community centers and partner organizations throughout the city.  Library staff travel throughout Nashville, delivering services and resources to make seniors feel connected, valued and empowered. Since the program's inception in 2017, it has served 1,500 to 2,000 seniors annually and was one of the programs highlighted in the NPL Library of the Year Award. 

Participants report using their newfound skills for pursuit of college degrees, new jobs, telehealth visits, and to facilitate family connections. One graduate shared with us recently, “During the pandemic, thanks to the wonderful people at NPL’s Digital Inclusion program, I got an iPad and learned how to see and chat with my grandson.”  The benefits are immediate, and for some of Nashville’s seniors, life changing. 

Steadfast partners like Google Fiber allow Nashville Public Library to focus on creating dramatic impacts for Nashvillians and programs that help our community become a more literate, imaginative, and equitable place.  

Posted by Shawn Bakker, President, Nashville Public Library Foundation