Alexandria, Virginia lost out in its bid to get Google Fiber to Kansas City a couple of years ago. The Washington Post has an update on how it is going in Kansas City now that all of the holes are dug and people are getting connected at speeds 100x faster than what you’re used to.
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.
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 this next leap forward will breed a whole new slate of innovations.
Read more at this link.