Great news for some lucky people in the Bay Area — you may soon have access to Google Fiber. Unfortunately, however, this isn’t a citywide buildout. Rather, Google is only using fiber that already exists and is acting as the service provider for end users. This is great if your house or apartment already has fiber connectivity, of course, but it doesn’t sound like it will bring anything to places that aren’t so fortunate.
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“By using existing fiber to connect some apartments and condos, as we’ve done before, we can bring service to residents more quickly,” Google explains. “This approach will allow us to serve a portion of San Francisco, complementing the City’s ongoing efforts to bring abundant, high-speed Internet to the City by the Bay.”
This is still in the very preliminary stages and Google isn’t listing any buildings that are going to get access to Google Fiber just yet. Instead it’s only instructing residents in San Francisco to sign up to receive updates as they come.
2016 looks like the year when Google decides to expand not just to medium-sized cities but to truly giant markets. We learned late last year that Google Fiber is looking into expanding into Los Angeles and Chicago, two of America’s biggest cities. Los Angeles has a population of 3.8 million with a metropolitan area of an estimated 18.5 million people, making it the second largest city in the U.S. in terms of population. Chicago, meanwhile, is America’s third biggest city in terms of population with an estimated 2.7 million people.
All that said, there’s still a lot of work left for Google to do. Google Fiber is still only up and running in three markets — Kansas City, Austin and Provo, Utah — while markets such as Atlanta, Charlotte and San Antonio are set to get it sometime over the next year.
