Salt Lake City becomes latest Google Fiber city

“Utah’s capital is officially a Google Fiber city.   “Google confirmed Tuesday it had picked Salt Lake City for its ultra-fast Internet and TV services, promising to make an advanced fiber-optic grid available to residential and business customers citywide within just a few years.   “We could not be

“Utah’s capital is officially a Google Fiber city.

“Google confirmed Tuesday it had picked Salt Lake City for its ultra-fast Internet and TV services, promising to make an advanced fiber-optic grid available to residential and business customers citywide within just a few years.

“We could not be more excited to have Google Fiber coming,” Mayor Ralph Becker said. “This leap in speeds will open up an entirely new universe of exciting possibilities for Salt Lake City residents.”

“The Mountain View, Calif., company’s announcement caps a yearlong market and technical study of the city as a potential locale for a Google-built network delivering gigabit-per-second access to users.

“Though customer hookups may be more than a year away, pending design and construction, the prospect already has city officials glowing about Google Fiber’s broad potential.

At a jubilant midmorning news conference, city leaders joined company executives in saying Google’s announcement signals a new future, with widely available, affordable and lightning-fast Web access spurring innovation, creativity, collaboration and prosperity.

“We’ve seen firsthand how speedy Internet can reshape communities, driving economic growth, emerging start-up scenes and new ways of using technology to improve lives,” said Devin Baer, Google’s associate city manager for Salt Lake City.

“Salt Lake City is the perfect place,” Baer said, “to show us what’s possible with gigabit speeds.”

Begun as an experiment in 2010, Google Fiber today is well established in Kansas City; Austin, Texas; and Provo. After Google’s January announcement that four Southeastern metro areas would get Google Fiber, Salt Lake City becomes the eighth U.S. locale in five years targeted for a fiber-optic network build-out by the $365 billion company.

Source: www.sltrib.com

With Google Fiber in Salt Lake City, Google Fiber in Provo, and UTOPIA offering service in West Valley City, Murray, Lindon, Orem, and many other cities in the Salt Lake and Utah Valleys, the Wasatch Front truly is ground zero for fiber-to-the-home deployments in the United States.

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