In an update to the story below… Austin City Council elected to postpone adoption of the List of 100 Community Connection Sites until its Dec. 12th meeting saying they wanted to review and tweak the list some more with Google. KUT has more on Council activity here.
Also floating around out there in the Fibersphere is this post from Google Fiber Chief, Mark Strama, that discusses how the construction process is being envisioned as it makes its way around the city starting sometime mid 2014.
ORIGINAL STORY – Here is a link to the PDFs of the LIST & Council RESOLUTION of Proposed Google Fiber Community Connection Sites coming before City Council tomorrow, November 21st.
And here are those sites neatly MAPPED courtesy of KUT.
After spending only about five minutes reviewing the list, some inexplicable glaring omissions would include:
- University of Texas – the 40 acres and other facilities like the Pickle research campus, ATI, IC2, etc.
- Austin Community College – all of their campuses and, in particular, the new Highland Center that will be a major central city magnet for the tech and creative industries over the next 5+ years.
- Austin Studios – film and production facilities on East 51st St
- Hospitals in our emerging health care services growth cluster
- …and no doubt much more!
How is this possible? These are all mega bandwidth users and fit the criteria for inclusion in the Community Connectedness program of public service locations intended for free Fiber service. St. Edward’s, Huston-Tillotson, Concordia are all on there – appropriately – but not UT or ACC. Seriously?
Can’t wait Google Fiber to arrive, ready to drop the existing cable companies after a lifetime of bad service. I’m hoping that this is the kicker the cable companies need to actually up their game at least!
Glad y’all are taking an interest in this – I’ll try to explain some of the “inexplicable.” UT’s well connected, as explained above. ACC is on the GAATN network that already connects many public buildings with fiber optic cable, so that’s probably why they didn’t apply. Austin Studios was included in Austin Film Society’s application that is on the proposed list. Google specified that they wouldn’t supply the fiber hookup for emergency services at this time, so that ruled out hospitals for the moment however some health care facilities are included.
With over 300 applications, not everyone could be chosen. However, there will be opportunities to connect more sites when fiberhoods are determined by Google and we know how many sites from this list will not qualify to be connected at that time. Turns out that the item was just postponed to Dec. 12th as well.
Hope you’ll stay engaged with this as it develops!
Yea, back when I worked in IT for the Chemistry department at UT, I got to put my hand on the backbone fiber cable that connected the University to the greater internet. They’ve got a connection that will remain decades ahead of anything any provider could give civilians.
UT’s 2013 Campus network report lists a time averaged capacity of 3,832 Mbps, has a 10Gbps and plans for a second 10Gbps link. They’re way beyond Google’s 1Gbps, as you would expect for a major research university with a supercomputer.
Wow, Steve. Thanks for that info. Maybe we should just skip Google Fiber and lobby to wire our town with the UT Campus Network! 🙂