City of Hickory - Thinking Big with a Gig

I will put out the City Council newsletter tomorrow - a lot more information than I had time to devote to last night. A very interest subject was brought to the forefront last night with the application, which the City of Hickory will take initiative on, to apply for a grant from Google to lay highspeed fiber-optic wire throughout the county. This network would bring 1 gigabyte connections to your home. That is 200 to 300 times faster than the fastest affordable connections we currently have (3 to 5 megabit). The Hickory Hound discussed this in an article entitled Broad Band!!! last July, 19 2009. In that article we discuss the need and what this type of network can do for our community.

Google is looking for communities with a population of 50,000 to 500,000 to implement this process and bring affordable highspeed connectivity to the home. I believe that we should be very proud of the whole City of Hickory government for taking the lead on this. Even if we did not receive this grant from Google, it gets us in line and lays the foundation for this happening sooner rather than later. That is the most important step. Recognizing that the need is there.

Here is the message from Google entitled Think Big with a Gig.

Here is an article from Rick Smyre of Communities of the Future in which he discusses how important these Broadband connections are and the type of innovations in the pipeline resulting from from 100 megabit+ connectivity - Identifying Weak Signals 2.

At a point in time in the future, Google is going to want input from the local citizenry on this issue. They will want to judge the need and desire for the implementation of this network. I will most certainly keep you informed. If this community ever had vital subject matter to rally around, this would be it. This is one process we need to focus our energy on.

In my opinion, we have Google, we have Apple, and now the implementation of this network will decisively make us a leading technology hub in this region, if not the nation. This could be the momentum shift that we have needed to turn our economic momentum around. This isn't a dream. This is truly something to be excited about!!!