After almost a a year of planning, Google today began rolling out its fiber backbone in Kansas City, and will start stretching the fiber to homes later this year to deliver blazing-fast Internet access and possibly pay TV.
Google chose Kansas City, Kansas, as the first city for its Google Fiber experiment last March, and added the bigger Kansas City in Missouri a few months later.
Google is hiring like crazy for its Google Fiber group in Mountain View, CA, according to job postings LinkedIn. A spokesperson told us that these new engineers will be working on getting the Kansas City network up and running, rather than working on new cities.
Google has a business interest in making the Internet faster, as the more time people spend online, the more likely they are to use Google for searches and see Google ads on various sites; slow page loading times turn people off.
The Kansas City experiment may also be the start of a Google pay-TV service that would compete against cable providers -- Google hired a former cable exec, Jeremy Stern, to talk to content providers, and the company's purchase of Motorola could give it technology for use in TV set top boxes.
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