Google Fiber Headed to Standford University First

Earlier this year Google announced plans to bring high-speed 1 Gbps broadband connections to as many as 500,000 Americans through fiber-to-home connections. Now the company is announcing that it will be starting with about 850 homes in the Standford University campus.

"We’ve reached an agreement with Stanford University to build an ultra-high speed broadband network to the university’s Residential Subdivision, a group of approximately 850 faculty- and staff-owned homes on campus," James Kelly, Product Manager at Google wrote.

"Through this trial, we plan to offer Internet speeds up to 1 gigabit per second—more than 100 times faster than what most people have access to today. We plan to start breaking ground in early 2011," he added.

While technically not part of the project Google announced earlier this year, it's an important first step for the company as it will enable its engineers to get some real feedback and test their ideas in practice.

There are several reasons why the Standford campus was chosen, not the least of which was its proximity to the Google headquarters. Standford was also OK with the idea of Google digging up its campus and experimenting with new technologies and techniques.

"Stanford’s Residential Subdivision—our first 'beta' deployment to real customers—will be a key step towards that goal. We’ll be able to take what we learn from this small deployment to help scale our project more effectively and efficiently to much larger communities," Kelly explained.

Google hopes to get some valuable data from this first testing project. With the lessons learned from this, the company wants to move forward with its plans to bring fiber-to-home connections to select communities.

That part of the program is still very much underway and the selection process is ongoing. Google didn't have anything to add about that program yet, except for the fact that it still plans to announce the communities where the connections will be deployed by the end of this year.