I live in Kansas City, and Google's gigabit fiber internet service rollout is in full swing. The way they're installing it and paying for infrastructure is pretty cool. You have two options, you can either sign a two year service agreement for one of their high speed packages or you can pay a $300 dollar infrastructure fee and get internet at current standard speeds for free for 7 years (the $300 can be split up over a year of monthly bills if you'd like). They're taking pre-registrations right now by neighborhood. Each neighborhood has to hit a certain percent of residents registered in order to greenlight the service for that area; the percentage varies depending on the amount of work required to update that area. The cool thing is that once a neighborhood has fiber, Google is going to offer free internet to libraries, schools, and other public/community organizations.

This has the other telecoms companies around here absolutely shitting their pants. I've been hearing that they're going door to door in already greenlit neighborhoods trying to get unwitting people to re-up on their old 2-year contracts and cutting deals - all in the hopes of locking them down before they hear about Google's insanely better deal.

I live in the ghetto so the odds of my neighborhood getting fiber is slim, sadly. Imagine what a gigabit up and down would be like! Imagine what that'd do for gaming if everyone had that kind of connection! It's kind of torturous being so close yet so far from that kind of speed.