Forget "Topeka"—as of yesterday, Topeka, Kansas will be referred to as "Google, Kansas" for the month of March.

Bizarre publicity stunt? Sure, but it's got nothing on the time in 1998 that Topeka became the US launch city for Pokemon games from Nintendo—and changed its name to "ToPikachu" (groan) for the day. At least this time, the city has a serious goal: get Google to bring in a 1Gbps fiber-to-the-home network.

Topeka wants to be Google's testbed for the new 1Gbps network that the company announced last month. Since that announcement, Google has been taking applications from cities around the country, and the grassroots response has been astonishing.

The city council supports the name-change idea, intended to show just how serious the city is about its bid. Still, leave it to the lawyers to ruin the party. According to the local paper, "City attorney Jackie Williams told the council that legally, the city couldn't change its name to Google for a short time period and then change it back. However, he said he saw no legal problem with Bunten's issuing a proclamation calling for Topeka to be referred to as 'Google.'"

From the official proclamation

It's not just the city council that has Google fever; interested citizens set up the Think Big Topeka website recently to push the city into action. "Imagine Topeka as a technology hot spot," says the site.

Indeed, behind that call to "imagine" is the reality that many of the cities currently hoping for the nod from Google are not technology hot spots. The palpable excitement around the fiber project shows just how strongly many Americans believe that such a fiber network could do more than bring faster YouTube streaming—it could fundamentally rebuild their communities.

The less-wired



Look, for instance, at Greensboro, North Carolina, which is seeking the Google fiber bid. "If you get Google Fiber," said a resident who has already relocated, "I will move back to Greensboro."

But Google wants only a testbed for its network, one that serves at most 500,000 people, and potentially many fewer. Cities like Greensboro, which could certainly benefit from such a network, face unbelievable competition. Down the road, Chapel Hill is also applying for the network.

Nearby Durham wants it too, and residents have already started the Hi Fiber Durham site to work on a proposal. The city has backed the effort, and Sam Poley of the Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau plans to "get thousands of people onto the field of the [minor league baseball] Durham Bulls Athletic Park to spell out the words 'We Want Google,'" according to the local Herald-Sun.

How would residents use a 1Gbps network? No one seems quite sure yet, and in fact one of Google's uses for the investment is to find out what can be done with truly high-speed networks. Durham's Hi Fiber group set up a Google Moderator page to take suggestions; among them so far are mostly ideas that don't need anything like 1Gbps. "I would watch Hulu and other streaming online content without interruption from buffering," said one.

But Raleigh residents want the network, too, and are gathering signatures on a Facebook page. If Greensboro hopes to entice people to move back to the city, it has serious competition—and that's just within one region of a single state.

Greensboro is up against plenty of other cities not usually thought of as technology hubs, places like Grand Rapids, MI, Duluth, MN, and Columbia, MO.

The cities are all pitching their many strengths to Google. "Grand Rapids owns about a third of the utility poles in the city. We also have a significant amount of underground conduit and some dark fiber," Sally Wesorick, an IT analyst for Grand Rapids, told a local website. "Use of those assets and others that we might have available might be negotiable."

Columbia residents have formed the ComoFiber group to bring fiber-to-the-home to their city; if the Google bid doesn't work out, "we aim to do it ourselves," says the group.

And, really, why wouldn't Google choose Columbia? It's "the most attractive city in the nation for this project. The reasons are numerous, but the biggest reason is really quite simple: Columbia is on the knife’s edge: the sweet spot between big, highly-developed cities and small, under-served towns."

As for post-industrial Duluth, Mayor Don Ness issued a statement in which dropped all talk of what "Duluth can do for Google" and resorted to the "what Google can do for Duluth" argument. The results were... colorful.

"Providing Google Fiber to Duluth would be akin to giving Picasso his first paintbrush, Brett Hull his first hockey stick, or giving Brin and Page start-up capital," he wrote on his blog. "OK, so that may be overstating it a bit, but that’s an indication of our ambition. If Google chooses Duluth, they can be sure we will make the most of the opportunity."

Reading through the various bids (and there are many, many more from modestly sized cities across the country), one is struck by the extent to which local residents and leaders already know that serious broadband connectivity is the future. There's no need for convincing on this point, and yet it's striking that it's Google—not an ISP—rolling out this project.

Cities across the country are praying for fiber, and many are putting their trust in Saint Google. Really, what choice do they have? If you're not in FiOS territory, your chance of a telco running a fiber line to your home in the near future remains small; prices for cable service, even at 50Mbps, remain high. It wasn't for nothing that Google pointedly plans to use the network to illustrate just how cheaply the entire project can be done; the company wants to pressure ISPs to act.

The well-wired

Topeka, Columbia, Duluth, and the others are also up against a separate class of city—well-wired places such as Palo Alto, CA, which already has 40+ miles of dark fiber in the ground.

Located in Silicon Valley (and just up the road from Google's main office in Mountain View), Palo Alto has already given up on stimulus money from the US government. Once it became clear that little cash would go to California, and that the priority would be rural and underserved areas, Palo Alto had to look elsewhere in its bid to wire the city with fiber.

According to the local paper, this led to the following City Council moment:

Council Member Sid Espinosa, who once lived at the famous Addison Avenue house where Hewlett-Packard began, made a rare direct appeal to the cameras that broadcast the council meetings online. "If Google is out there listening, if any decision-makers are there and paying attention, we as a city are ready to move quickly to make this a reality," he said. "We have a commitment to this type of goal and program, and we have worked on this in a grassroots way and an organized way for many years."

But touting its already-wired credentials puts places like Palo Alto in competition with cities like Seattle, which has also done its own homework and can offer more resources.

Palo Alto might have a dark fiber ring in the ground, but Seattle is offering Google "an extensive existing fiber network of over 500 miles connecting every school, college and major government building in the City. In Seattle, 88% of residents have home computers, 84% have Internet access and 74% already have Internet access faster than dial-up... The city owns or co-owns 100,000 poles on which to construct the network. City-owned electric and water utilities could use the network for energy management, smart grid, and other innovative uses. Seattle has also extensively deployed technology in public safety—computers in every police and fire vehicle, video cameras in every patrol vehicle and laptops for every police officer. This current deployment of technology could spur innovative public safety uses of a fiber network in the future."

Madison, WI hopes to compete with the techies out West, stressing its own credentials as a technology-driven city ("We are, big time," says the mayor on his blog) and offering Google "a good start on fiber with strands running under some streets and conduits already in place under some of our recently reconstructed major streets like East Washington Ave."

And Madison hopes it has a trump card: "It doesn't hurt that Google already has a foothold in Madison with an office right here."

If Madison thinks it can win out by being a wired university town with a Google office, though, it still has to compete with towns like Ann Arbor, MI that boast the same credentials and are competing for the same prize.

In the end, there can be only one



The Google announcement set off a powerful rush of hope, longing, and even desperation across the US—and why not? Cities see high-speed connectivity as the future, they don't feel like existing ISPs offer the needed innovation, and Google is offering to shoulder the cost of the network.

In Illinois, even the governor has gotten involved, calling on cities to "embrace Google’s challenge."

Cities have done so: Peoria recently hosted a Google Day in support of its bid, Evanston has already announced its submission, and even Quincy hopes to score the fiber network. Watch a Quincy resident make his pitch to Google and realize just how much hope so many people have placed in the power of high-speed networking—and just how badly they feel let down by existing ISPs.

Quincy, IL makes its pitch to Google

It's probably not helpful in the long run for cities this desperate for world-class connectivity to place so much hope in a single company, and the degree to which some city officials are willing to prostrate themselves before a multi-gajillion dollar international behemoth like Google is a bit unseemly—Topeka's official "Google, Kansas" proclamation opened by praising Google for being a "corporation who maintains a small company feel." Talk about laying it on with a trowel.

But there's no denying Google's project is an important one, and there's no denying that people want this badly. When Bellingham, WA commissioned a survey of its residents a few weeks back, 95 percent of respondents wanted the city to apply for the Google project.

Terrific—but when Google makes its choice, there are going to be hundreds of disappointed cities who have no fiber network and few prospects of getting one soon. One wonders if, after so many cities have given so much thought to the benefits such a network could bring, some might be willing to build one themselves.