With much fanfare, Kansas City was selected in 2011 as the launching site for Google's experimental fast fiber-optic network. Now, a dispute about how and where to run fiber optic lines on poles in the city is causing significant delays.
"When Google Inc. announced last spring that Kansas City, Kan., had landed the tech company's much-pursued super-speed Internet project, the company gushed about the local utility poles... What's more, the city and county governments are one, and that same Unified Government of Wyandotte County owns the Kansas City Board of Public Utilities and its utility poles. That figured to make negotiations over installing Google's fiber easier," writes Scott Canon.
At expected speeds of 1 Gigabit per second, or about 20-30 times faster than a typical Cable or DSL Internet connection, entrenched Internet providers are displeased with the competition that Google's entry into the market represents: "The dispute over the rules that will govern Google's work on the poles also highlights what cable companies, to whom Google poses competition, see as favoritism."
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Read the full story: Google Fiber work in KCK is delayed by dispute over how its wires are hung
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