If you live in Provo, Utah: Congratulations, you just joined the fairly exclusive club of geeks who don’t have to whine about Google Fiber not coming to your city.
Google, along with Mayor John Curtis, have just announced that Provo will be the third city to hop on Google’s crazy-fast fiber-optic network.
Google Fiber is the company’s effort to slowly-but-surely build a nationwide, gloriously high-speed Internet Service Provider. They’ll provide residents of each city with a free 5 megabit connection for at least seven years… which is nice and all, but here’s the real grab: they’re also offering 1 gigabit connections (that’s a theoretical max speed of 125 megabytes per second, both upload and download) for $70 a month. Is it kind of spooky to have Google as your ISP? Absolutely, but LALALA CAN’T HEAR YOU I’M BUSY DOWNLOADING THE ENTIRE INTERNET.
Google Fiber first rolled out as a test program in Kansas City, Mo., roughly two years ago. Just last week, Austin, Texas, was announced as the second city. For the third city to already be announced could suggest that we’ll soon start seeing more cities more quickly.
As part of the deal, Google also announced that they’ve agreed to purchase iProvo, the city’s primary provider of Fiber to the Home services. The city still needs to approve the acquisition with a vote next week, and Google will have to do a fair amount of upgrading to their network tech — but overall, it should speed up the rollout in the city considerably.
Terms of the acquisition have not been disclosed.
While Google’s announcement itself makes no mention of when their Provo network should go live, an FAQ on the site says they hope to have their first Provo customers connected by the end of 2013.
