You’re not in Mountain View anymore

Google started laying the groundwork for Fiber long before installing its first internet connection in November 2012. It inked deals with the mayors of Kansas City, Kansas and Kansas City, Missouri, to be able to use city offices, equipment, and electricity free of charge in exchange for installing Fiber in some government buildings. Google took over an entire strip mall near the state border to create its retail storefront for Fiber, the "Fiber Space." But the even sweeter deal came in the form of what Google was able to avoid: the "universal service" obligation, or long-established federal and state laws that force most other big telecommunications companies to at least offer their services to an entire city or town. Other companies have managed to avoid this as well.

Google started laying the groundwork for Fiber long before installing its first internet connection

And in Kansas City, the state governments on both sides of the state border permitted Google to install Fiber internet only in select areas based on predetermined user demand. In the summer of 2012, Google carved up the entire Kansas City metropolitan area into 202 differently sized neighborhoods of its own making, which it called "Fiberhoods." Google then imposed minimum pre-registration requirements for each based on population density: between 5 and 25 percent of households in every Fiberhood had to pre-register online, or in person at the Fiber Space, before Google would bring internet to anyone in those areas. Areas with higher population density had higher pre-registration requirements. Pre-registration cost $10 per household, and Google gave Kansas Citians about six weeks to sign up.

Google also knew that cost would be an issue for some Kansas City residents when going into its Fiber launch. After all, the company comissioned its own comprehensive survey ahead of time showing that 25 percent of Kansas Citians don’t have a home broadband internet connection, and that 17 percent don’t have home internet access of any sort, not even dial-up. Of that 17 percent, 46 percent are African-American, 64 percent have only a high school-level education or less, and 42 percent reported earning less than $25,000 a year. That compares to 98 percent of America that has access to the internet, and 20 percent of adults nationally who nonetheless still don’t use it.

And Google made a big point to say that it wanted to use Fiber to help mend this disparity. "The Google Fiber project is about making the web better and faster — but it’s also about making the internet more accessible for people throughout Kansas City," wrote Kenneth Carter, policy counsel at Google, in a blog post about the study. "Digital inclusion here is a priority for Google, and it’s clear that it’s also a priority for community nonprofits and the local government." That’s partly why in addition to its blazing-fast, 1-gigabit connection speeds — which the company advertised as 100 times faster than the national average for broadband at the time — Google also offered its more modest, 5-megabit option for "free."

The rollout

Google promoted the Fiber rollout as a fun bonding experience for communities, encouraging those residents who wanted to receive Fiber to become its unpaid ambassadors, going out on "Fiber Rallies" to convince their neighbors to pre-register, even if those neighbors didn’t necessarily want Fiber (Google noted it would reimburse the $10 pre-registration fee for households that later decided they didn’t want the service when it came to paying the full installation and service fees). Google also sent its own employees out in trucks and vans to canvas neighborhoods with fliers and knock on doors.

But as the September 2012 deadline for Google Fiber pre-registrations approached, it became clear that many Fiberhoods, especially those in Kansas City’s historically poorer and blacker areas, were probably going to miss their goals. So just over a week before the deadline, Google recalibrated its goals, lowering the quotas for many Fiberhoods to allow 180 out of 202 (90 percent), to qualify for Fiber service. "Our build-by-demand model is unique," wrote Kevin Lo, Google Fiber’s general manager, in a blog post explaining the recalibration. "It will keep our prices low by using efficient networking and construction processes."

To that end, Google may have succeeded: while the company itself doesn’t break out numbers on Fiber, one independent estimate indicates it may spend as "little" as $94 million on the Kansas City network in 2013, far less than the tens of billions in revenue Google reports each quarter.

But when it comes to who actually has Fiber today, and who’s on track to get it, things start to get murky. When asked by The Verge to provide an exact number of households it has connected with Fiber so far, Google declined, pointing instead to the maps on its Google Fiber website, which show just 12 completed Fiberhood installations. "We don't have a number of households to share, but we're currently building and installing Fiber in 60-plus Fiberhoods throughout Kansas City, Kansas and Kansas City, Missouri," Wandres says. Another independent estimate by internet traffic monitor Akamai pegs the number of total Google Fiber customers somewhere below 830.

Google Fiber has also been installed in a few local restaurants and cafes. And several optimistic, wealthy tech entrepreneurs from out of state have also purchased Fiber-connected houses in Kansas City that they’re renting to local startups, creating a small, insular community known as the "Startup Village." But even those users say they haven’t noticed much of a difference when using Fiber’s top-tier, gigabit-speed connection. "It saves me a few minutes in a day," says David Hulsen, a co-founder of local startup RFP365.

And for many of those in Kansas City’s poorer, historically black areas, Google Fiber never really seemed like an option. "When they came into the community, there was a lot of excitement, but then when the criteria came down, we knew that this wasn’t us," says Dixon.

Money was an issue, but Dixon says the minimum pre-registration requirements were also barriers to adoption, because they necessitated that people in the neighborhood work together, even if they didn’t necessarily know or like each other, let alone have similar incomes: "[Google]’s saying, I’ve got to get 10 square blocks of my neighborhood together before I can get this, and then everybody’s to come up with $300 — it can’t happen like that in this community."

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