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Update: Google has since confirmed that it will expand to 18 cities within the four metro areas below, with construction to start “within several months,” according to Dennis Kish, the VP of Google Fiber. It also added that it is continuing to explore bringing fiber to Phoenix, Portland, Salt Lake City, San Antonio and San Jose, and will have updates on these potential Google Fiber cities later this year. We may add updates after a press conference held at 11:30 PST.

Google is set to announce its gigabit fiber-to-the-home service in Atlanta; Nashville, Tennessee; Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina this week according to the Wall Street Journal. The Journal quoted sources close to the events and said that local news media in Atlanta and Nashville were invited to events on Tuesday and the North Carolina cities were invited to events on Thursday.

These cities are among the nine that Google named last February as under consideration for fiber service. Other cities include San Jose, California and San Antonio, Texas. Currently [company]Google[/company] has a fiber network in Kansas City, Kansas; Kansas City, Missouri; Provo, Utah and Austin, Texas. It has also spurred several of the local incumbents in those and other areas of the country to start laying fiber services.

The Journal article says that the other areas where Google announced interest in building fiber networks should not consider any new network announcements to mean they are out of the running. According to the article:

[blockquote person=”” attribution=””]Google has told some officials in those cities that it hasn’t ruled them out, and has yet to make a final decision.

David Vossbrink, a spokesman for the city of San Jose, said a Google Fiber official told him Monday that Google would be announcing expansion cities beginning Tuesday. “The message was that these announcements should not be considered the end of the road for the other areas,” Mr. Vossbrink said.

[/blockquote]

As it stands today, Google has every interest in prolonging the threat of its expansion for as long as possible. Even before laying conduit in Austin, it managed to spur AT&T to start upgrading its own network in Austin and pushed a local cable overbuilder to actually start offering gigabit service in limited areas before Google or AT&T actually ever managed to. AT&T actually serves more people I know than Google with gigabit service in Austin, although that’s less a statement of actual homes passed than a measure of where my friends happen to live.

And so when it comes to pushing for faster broadband networks around the country, Google’s best weapon is actually the press release and the threat of action, because it spurs the local government to clear roadblocks and gets incumbents to consider and sometimes actually upgrade their service. That said, I still eagerly await the day the Google truck rolls to my neighborhood in Austin.