The city of Madison held a public meeting Thursday to discuss implications and ideas about its application to bring ""ultra high speed broadband"" called Google Fiber to Madison.
Google is planning to test ultra high-speed broadband networks in one or more locations across the country. The company said the network will provide one gigabyte per second and fiber-to-the-home connections that will advance broadband speed up to 100 times faster.
The city is currently drafting an application that, according to supporters, embodies why Madison would be the perfect candidate. Supporters claim that Madison has the perfect population size of 225,000 and a unique combination of tech-savvy civilians who are also engaged in the community.
""Madison has a lot of unique assets—governmental, business and academic. We need to get this uniqueness exposed,"" said Preston Austin, creator of Madfiber.net, a webpage designed to provide information about the application and advise the public about how to further support Google Fiber.
The Google Fiber project would not affect the current Madison campus-broadband network, but would still impact students living off-campus.
According to Brian Rust, communications director in the Division of Information Technology at UW-Madison, ""We already have a very high-performance network. But it would provide a significant boost in network capacity for approximately 34,000 UW students who live off-campus.""
""The UW campus would benefit in that those who are off-campus could access on-campus resources much more quickly,"" he said in an e-mail.
According to supporters, implementation of Google Fiber also means more opportunities for businesses. With faster Internet, they argue, there will be a massive increase in technological businesses in the industry that will benefit the economy of the city.
Google's Fiber network would not threaten competition with other broadband companies. Customers of any network provider could take advantage of Google Fiber.
According to one supporter at the meeting, ""Google is giving us all a magic feather saying that this is no longer a zero-sum game, they are not going to put other broadband companies such as AT&T or Charter out of business. Everyone can win.""
The application will be sent to Google on March 26 for consideration.
