City officials remain confident Madison will become the test city for Google’s approaching ultra high-speed Internet experiment. 

Google Fiber, which will offer communities Internet speeds of up to one gigabit per second, has announced the next step in the application process for certain United States cities to become the first to use the technology. 

The one gigabit per second speed of the prospective network will mean less wait time on the Internet for everyone, from local businesses to a UW student surfing the web at a coffee shop.

On Thursday, Google announced an agreement with Stanford University to offer the staff community at the university’s Palo Alto, Calif. campus with networking capabilities similar to the plan announced earlier this year with Google Fiber. 

A statement from Google said the trial is separate from the community selection application that Madison is a part of, but it will set a firm foundation on how the company will go about implementing the new network capabilities.
The beta test should demonstrate what Madison may be looking forward to in the project. 

As for Madison and its application for Google Fiber, the press release said the technology behemoth will come to a decision by the end of the year, but any more information is unavailable.
Madison is one of 1100 U.S. cities that have sent Google applications for the network, making for heavy competition.

Along with the application, Madison has implemented grassroots involvement as well as promotional devices to make a strong and impressive case for the application, including the website Madfiber.net and the Google Fiber-inspired ice cream from UW’s own Babcock Hall.

Rachel Strauch-Nelson, spokesperson for Mayor Dave Cieslewicz, said Madison has a good chance at winning the bid for the experiment.

“It would be a big boost for the economy, more jobs would be created, resources would be coming in and this chance will put us ahead of the curve,” Strauch-Nelson said. 

In the case of Madison not being accepted to be the test community, the city’s IT department is working on its own fiber optics technology, though not to the scale of what Google Fiber is offering, Strauch-Nelson said. 

Although Google has been ambiguous in its description of exactly what it is looking for in the application as well as its future goals, Strauch-Nelson said Madison did its best to combine city and public efforts in an attempt to provide a community-encompassing vision for this opportunity. 

The application asked general questions concerning the city’s infrastructure and preexisting cable networks and their interconnectedness in order to determine the most efficient community to begin the project. 

“There wasn’t a defined criteria out there, but Google asked for technological as well as community information about the city,” Strauch-Nelson said. “We had a cool partnership between the city and folks in the community that were excited about it.”

Strauch-Nelson said since the application was sent to Google no new updates have been received as to where Madison, or any other city for that matter, is in the community selection process at this time.