Greetings from Texas — where everything is bigger, including our Austin fiber network, which has grown in leaps and bounds since you last heard from us. It’s not just bigger, it’s also faster. As of today, customers across Austin can sign up for 5 Gig which comes with symmetrical upload and download speeds up to 5,000 mbps, an included Wi-Fi 6 router, up to two mesh extenders, a 10 Gig Fiber Jack, and professional installation for $125 month.

And 5 Gig will be available in a lot more places as new construction areas are connected to our network and we open sign-ups for service in new neighborhoods. We’ve continued to grow our network within the City of Austin, and we’ve also begun serving customers in several Travis County neighborhoods located just outside of Austin’s city limits. And we’ll be kicking off construction in both Round Rock and West Lake Hills in the coming months.

We also recently announced expansion to Rollingwood, and our team is in conversations with many other surrounding communities about bringing GFiber to their residents and businesses. We’re working to bring better internet to more people across Central Texas, and hope to have more to share soon.

Our investment in the Austin community has continued to deepen as our network has grown. GFiber’s Gigabit Community program, in collaboration with the Housing Authority of the City of Austin (HACA), continues to expand — launching three new communities over the last two years serving hundreds of additional households in need with free gigabit internet, along with devices and digital skills training. This brings the total number of Austin families served by the program to over 1,300. 

Next up is Espero at Rutland, which will support our community's goal to transition our homeless neighbors into long term housing.

Our Community Connections program, which kicked off in 2013, also continues to grow — GFiber now provides gigabit internet to more than 50 local community organizations and institutions in Austin at no cost. Since our last city update, we’ve connected 18 new Community Connections, including: 

• Austin PBS

• Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid

• The ARC of the Capital Area

• Boys and Girls Clubs of the Austin Area

• Ballet Austin

• McCallum High School

• Central Health - East Austin

• Latinitas 

As our network reaches new neighborhoods and cities, more organizations become eligible for this program, and we’ll continue to help them meet their internet needs so they can serve their constituencies and their missions.

Along with these two primary programs, Google Fiber continues to work with local organizations to increase access to quality internet and to build digital literacy and STEM skills across Austin. 

Working with Foundation Communities, Google Fiber is providing gigabit internet to those transitioning to permanent housing. Additionally, we’re supporting Community Tech Network’s efforts to get more Austinites enrolled in the Affordable Connectivity Program, a federal program that provides $30 a month for internet service to those who are eligible.

However, internet access without the ability to navigate the online world won’t get you anywhere. Recent partnerships with amazing local organizations working to ensure everybody has the digital skills they need to thrive include: 

• Avance-Austin, a recent NTEN Catalyst Award-winner for their outstanding digital inclusion work in our community

• Austin Free Net, which has for decades worked to ensure all our neighbors have access to technology and the skills to use it

As you can see, we’ve got a lot going on in Austin — and it’s all speeding up (literally!) with 5 Gig coming online now. Additionally, we’ll start testing 20 Gig service in Austin later this year.

If you are looking for how to keep up on what’s happening in your neighborhood, you can sign up for updates here. And follow us on social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn) to get the latest news from throughout the Central Texas region. 

Posted by John-Michael Cortez, Government & Community Affairs Manager

What a year it’s been for Google Fiber in Kansas City! 

On July 26, we celebrated our 11th “launchiversary” of sign ups in KCK and KCMO. I remember that day well, as the first employee in and can’t believe how much we’ve grown over the last decade plus. 

We started in a few neighborhoods, and now cover a majority of the KC metro area. In the past year alone, we announced expansion Parkville, Liberty, Riverside, and, just yesterday, Independence. This adds to the portfolio of Kansas City communities that benefit from our award-winning internet. 

Kansas City has also been paving the way for Google Fiber’s new multigig products - 5 Gig launched here on Valentine’s Day, making KC customers the first to have access. Additionally, UMKC’s School of Computing and Engineering are field testing 20 Gig speeds (read more about how they are using that to power real-time 3D development and reimagine the power of virtual reality).

Since the very beginning, we’ve worked with local organizations to make an impact across our community.Over the past year, we’ve upgraded service to the WWI Museum and Memorial to help them manage a major KC event (spoiler alert: they decided to keep the 5 Gig) andhelped America’s National Negro Leagues Baseball Museum tell its story and expand its legacy to an even wider audience. ; Our 2022-23 KC Digital Inclusion Fellow, Erika García Reyes of Revolución Educativa, helped nonprofit professionals boost digital equity in our community. 

• We’ve also worked with many incredible partners on digital equity issues: PCs for People provided laptops for more than 70 residents within the Urban Neighborhood Initiative and our existing Gigabit Communities

• KU Center for Digital Inclusion, in partnership with UMKC, provided a digital navigator who will hold office hours at public libraries and community centers to help support and build digital literacy skills for women leaving incarceration in the KC metro area 

KU's Center for Digital Inclusion accepts the Excellence in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Award from the University Economic Development Association

Bringing high quality internet to the masses doesn’t happen without incredible partners. Our team of suppliers provide us with everything from technical operations to on-site catering to marketing services and far beyond. Simply put: We couldn’t do what we do without them.

Is your company interested in becoming a supplier for Google Fiber? 

As our network expands across the country, we continue to look for top-tier suppliers to help us grow. Check out our Supplier Registration page for more information about the kinds of suppliers we work with and how to join their ranks.

Posted by Nolan Klenow, Category Manager

Google Fiber  recently opened the doors to a vibrant office space in Huntsville’s MidCity District. Located in the heart of the city, the mixed-use area in Huntsville’s MidCity District is the gateway to some of the world’s largest research and technology hubs, making it an ideal spot for Google Fiber to do business. 

The MidCity District is a thriving, eclectic part of Huntsville, and we’re looking forward to being a part of this community. 

As we often do in our offices, we wanted to reflect our local art scene. Huntsville artist, John “Jahni” Moore, painted an original mural titled “Inner Connection” in one of the office’s common areas. 

Jahni’s inspiration and meaning behind this complex work of art:  

“Taking into consideration the miraculous history of the city as “The Space Capital” and leader in technology and research, underscored by diversity, family life, and community collaboration, the MidCity’s culture forward initiative, and Google Fiber’s intent to bridge fast and reliable connectivity between spaces and people, I channeled an imagery that pays homage to this magnificent recipe.” 

This isn’t Jahni’s first time working with Google Fiber. A Huntsville native, Jahni’s public work is known throughout the city, including his piece “Space Is Our Place” which was commissioned by Google Fiber. Located at Campus No.  805, this mural was recognized by Parade Magazine as the best mural in Alabama in 2019. When he was approached to consider another Google Fiber piece, Jahni knew he wanted to truly connect to the essence of Huntsville while balancing a creative edge. 

“The mural will serve as a window to the imaginative possibilities wrapped in southern hospitality and ingenuity of industry that is the bedrock of this city,” said Jahni. “The young woman represents unlimited creation in action. She paints with the red line that represents life and the living fiber of connectivity. It travels throughout the piece, even as her shoestrings and finally trailing off into the vast frontier of space.”  

Google Fiber recently announced that we’re looking for organizations in Huntsville to test a 20 Gig service, taking fiber connectivity to the next level. The new office gives our team a great new home to continue to make big things happen in northern Alabama.

Posted by Ryun Jackson, Government & Community Affairs Manager. 

The speed keeps on coming. Starting today, Google Fiber customers in North Carolina can sign up for 5 Gig for just $125 a month. 

With our 5 Gig product you get symmetrical upload and download speeds (check out the screenshot below from a test in Concord, NC) along with a Wi-Fi 6 router, up to two mesh extenders, a 10 Gig Fiber Jack, and professional installation — all for the same price. And as always with Google Fiber, you also have 1 TB of cloud storage, no data caps, and no annual contracts.

We’re continuing to roll out both 5 Gig and 8 Gig products across all our cities, so stay tuned. . .summer is just speeding up!

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

The University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) School of Science and Engineering has been the first field test for 20 Gig Google Fiber internet speed. Michael Eichenseer, who oversees the UMKC AR/VR lab and has his own company, VRdojo, got to try it out at work and decided to upgrade to Google Fiber’s 5 Gig at home.

When Google Fiber first came to Kansas City, I was attending the Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T) in Rolla. From the moment it was announced, this country boy — who grew up in southern Missouri, gaming on hand-me-down computers and dial-up era internet connections — wanted nothing more than to live somewhere with a Google Fiber connection.

After living in a handful of states as I tried my hand at a traditional career (and inevitably landing in the ever-changing world of startups), that opportunity came. When a friend offered me a part-time position as a bartender in downtown Kansas City, I was quick to say yes like any successful entrepreneur.

The idea of bartending in KC appealed to me for a few reasons. One, I'm social by nature. Even my hours spent gaming in the basement as a kid were always spent online with friends. Getting paid to be social sounded pretty cool. Also, bartending downtown meant a direct connection to movers and shakers in the city. But most of all, the part-time nature of bartending left me more time for research, writing and developing prototypes for my true focus: Virtual Reality (VR).

Anytime I wasn't bartending — or helping open the first free roam VR arcade in Kansas City — I was home working with VR. I competed in some of the first-ever VR leagues, wrote countless blog posts about the future of VR technology and prototyped my ideas for VR applications. All of this was made easier by the best internet connection I'd ever experienced.

For the past four years, I've been focused on building my company, VRdojo. My Google Fiber service has been an integral part of helping me in the development process, specifically by making my uploading and downloading of the large files I deal with daily almost instant. It even saves us money because I can host large files and servers using my internet service from my home. We're building technologies to power massive virtual worlds, and not to bore anyone with the technical side of our business, VRdojo’s calculations show through our use of residential Google Fiber connection, that it could handle tens of thousands of users connected and online at one time. That is massive!

When I'm not working on VRdojo, I'm running the AR/VR Labs at UMKC where we're currently testing a 20 Gig Google Fiber connection. So far, my students are enjoying the same benefits as my company; they’ve experienced an incredibly low-friction workflow when it comes to downloading and uploading large files involved with real-time 3D development. There is also a lot of talk around how our team can further test the 20 Gig speeds for research and potential use cases such as streaming high-fidelity VR experiences directly to devices (I mean, imagine a YouTube video except it's 3D and interactive — no download or install required).

The gamer in me that grew squeezing all I could out of a dial up internet connection has never been happier. The entrepreneur in me continues to believe we've barely scratched the surface on ultra-high bandwidth internet connections and their possibilities. I truly believe Kansas City is one of the best places for entrepreneurs, especially those building in the digital world, and a big part of that experience, for me, has been driven by my use of Google Fiber. 

Michael Eichenseer, AR/VR Coordinator, UMKC, and Founder, vRDojo