Google Fiber is bringing its gigabit-speed, fiber optic Internet and television service to Huntsville, Mayor Tommy Battle announced today.

Starting in mid-2017, Google will begin connecting homes and small- to mid-sized businesses to the Internet at speeds up to 1 gigabit per second - up to 85 times faster than average current speeds in the United States. Citywide service is expected in four years.

"If you're going to have a high-tech community," Battle said, "if you're going to be able to address the new workforce that's out there, you're going to have a lot of people who want to work from home - mothers and fathers with children, biotech people - who are going to need high-speed Internet service."

Google Fiber now serves Kansas City; Provo, Utah; Austin, Texas; and Atlanta, Ga., and had announced plans to expand to five other cities, including Nashville. Huntsville would become the tenth city in the nation with Google Fiber.

"You know far better than us that Rocket City is a great place to show what's possible with super-fast Internet," Google Fiber Expansion Director Jill Szuchmacher said in an interview, "given the strong science and technology presence and history. We are excited to partner with the city to help bring Huntsville this very high-speed Internet service. We can't wait to get started."

"Speeds this high mean families spend less time waiting for websites to load or arguing about bandwidth and more time just using the Web," Szuchmacher said. "For businesses, it can mean uploading and downloading very large files in just seconds, as opposed to minutes or hours, increasing efficiency across the board."

Partnering with utilities

Google Fiber will partner with Huntsville Utilities, which is extending its fiber-optic cable network to build a "smart utility grid" that can reroute power faster to repair outages, among other things.

"We are building the network for our own purposes," utility President and CEO Jay Stowe said in an interview. "It's going to have excess fiber that's available for lease, and Google will be the first company to lease that fiber."

Under the plan, Huntsville Utilities will own the system's fiber backbone, and Google will own the power line-to-home connections, handle all hookups and provide the services.

"This is the first time we are partnering in this way," Szuchmacher said.

"It's a unique model," Battle said. "This may be the model for mid-tier cities to put in a (fiber) backbone and have private industry work off that backbone."

Fiber to the county

The utility, which serves all of Madison County, will run fiber into the county - at first to substations and other infrastructure - raising the possibility of providers bringing gigabit service to Madison and rural areas, too.

"But the work we're doing to lease the dark fiber to (Google) is just within the city limits of Huntsville," Stowe said. Dark fiber is fiber-optic cable before data is moving through it.

Huntsville Utilities expects to spend $55- to $60 million on the fiber expansion, but to recoup that from the lease to Google and other companies wishing to lease city fiber.

Price points

Szuchmacher said it is too soon to say what Google fiber service will cost in Huntsville, but existing monthly rates in other cities are around $70 for high-speed Internet and $130 for Internet plus 150-channel Google high-definition TV.

Battle's team has been pushing to bring high-speed Internet to Huntsville for at least seven years. It tried to land Google Fiber's first citywide service in 2013 but lost - along with more than 1,000 other cities - to a bid from Kansas City.

In 2015 as part of its Gig City push, Huntsville asked companies to bring their ideas for high-speed Internet to the city. It had 13 responses, but Stowe said no company was ready with every piece of the puzzle.

Huntsville considered the Chattanooga model, where the local utility is the Internet, television and telephone provider, Stowe said, and it considered limited service to businesses or government offices.

"Each either had a problem or was too expensive or we didn't feel comfortable with that decision," Stowe said.

It was in this process that Szuchmacher expressed Google's interest. "We got in touch to see if we could play a role," she said.

City economic development officer Harrison Diamond, Stowe, Battle, and others have been working the issue "aggressively" for the past 6-7 months. They say they consider high-speed Internet a basic utility of the future just like water, natural gas and electricity.