Let’s get up to speed

Frequently asked questions

• Which metro areas are included?

  Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville, Phoenix, Portland, Raleigh-Durham, Salt Lake City, San Antonio, and San Jose.

• Which cities are included?

  Arizona

  - Phoenix, Scottsdale, Tempe

  California

  - San Jose, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Palo Alto

  Georgia

  - Atlanta, Avondale Estates, Brookhaven, College Park, Decatur, East Point, Hapeville, Sandy Springs, Smyrna

  North Carolina

  - Charlotte, Carrboro, Cary, Chapel Hill, Durham, Garner, Morrisville, Raleigh

  Oregon

  - Portland, Beaverton, Hillsboro, Gresham, Lake Oswego, Tigard

  Tennessee

  - Nashville-Davidson

  Texas

  - San Antonio

  Utah

  - Salt Lake City

• I live in one of these cities and I want to help. What can I do?

  We first need to work with your city leaders to see if Fiber is a good fit. If you want to stay in the loop on our progress, please sign up here. We’ll send you updates and let you know when we might need your help in the future.

• Why have you chosen this list of cities?

  These cities are led by people who have been working hard to bring faster Internet speeds and the latest technologies to their residents. We believe these are communities who will do amazing things with a gig. And they are diverse -- not just geographically, but in the ways they’ll give us opportunities to learn about the wide range of challenges and obstacles that communities might face in trying to build a new fiber network.

• Will you be expanding to other cities? When?

  Not for now. We have a lot of work to do with these 34 cities, in addition to bringing Fiber to customers in Kansas City, Austin and Provo. If you’d like to stay updated about our progress, please sign up for our mailing list.

• How long before these cities know whether they’ll be a Fiber city or not?

  This process will take some time, but we hope to have updates on which cities will get Fiber by the end of the year. We want to have the chance to work closely with every city to map out and understand all possible local needs and challenges.

• What exactly do cities need to do now?

  We will be working closely with the mayors and staff from each of these 34 cities. We’ll walk through details about the Google study and about the fiber-ready checklist, and we’ll answer any questions they have. After that, we will be working closely with the cities over the next few months as we work on our study and they work on their checklist. Then, the completed checklist items will be due to us on May 1.

• What would keep you from bringing Fiber to a community?

  We hope to bring Google Fiber to every city on this list, but there are a few circumstances that might make it tough and even impossible to build our Fiber network in a city. The city’s checklist is the most important step towards making their community ready for the fiber-optic networks of the future. If a city doesn’t want to proceed with us and chooses not to complete their checklist, we won’t be able to bring them Google Fiber. There are also some physical characteristics of a city that might make it really complex for us to build Google Fiber. For example, underground construction might be really difficult due to bedrock or unusually hard soil. In these situations, we would share what we learned in our studies with city leaders and we hope they’d be able to use that information to explore other options for bringing super high speed broadband to their residents.

• What is on the checklist? Why are these things so important?

  There are three core items on our fiber ready checklist.

  • Provide information about existing infrastructure: We’re asking cities to provide accurate information about local infrastructure like utility poles, conduit and existing water, gas and electricity lines so we’d know where to efficiently place every foot of fiber.
  • Help ensure access to existing infrastructure: We’re asking cities to help ensure that we, and other providers, can access and lease existing infrastructure. It would be wasteful and disruptive to put up duplicate utility poles or to dig up streets unnecessarily, when we could use existing poles or conduit.
  • Help make construction speedy and predictable: We’re asking cities to make sure they have efficient and predictable permit and construction processes appropriate for a project as large as a Google Fiber network build.

  
  

  You can see the full checklist here.

• How did you decide the list of items a city needs to do in order to be considered for Fiber?

  The checklist was compiled based on (1) a combination of things we’ve learned from our work so far in our first Google Fiber cities, and (2) a selection of best practices that have been highlighted by the Fiber to the Home Council, as well as the US Conference of Mayors, among others.

• How does this impact Kansas City, Provo, and Austin?

  We’re still very focused on Kansas City, Provo, and Austin. Our discussions with these new cities will not impact our current operations in any of our existing Fiber cities, and we are continuing to build in those cities.