Google Fiber Is Coming to Four More Big Cities

Google has announced that 18 more cities across four metropolitan areas will receive its super-high-speed fiber optic internet service: Atlanta; Charlotte, North Carolina; Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina; and Nashville, Tennessee.

The tech giant hasn’t said when the new services will be available. But after announcing in 2013 that would be available in Austin, Texas, the company needed nearly two years to begin offering service in select Austin neighborhoods.

Last year, Google revealed that was considering nine metropolitan areas for expansion, including the four that were eventually selected. Google has yet to announce plans for the remaining five areas. “We’re also continuing to explore bringing fiber to five additional metro areas—Phoenix, Portland, Salt Lake City, San Antonio and San Jose, and will have updates on these potential Fiber cities later this year,” the company said in a blog post.

National expansion of Google Fiber could help the U.S. play catch-up with countries that has have widely deployed super-high-speed internet services. The U.S. has continually ranked behind countries like Japan, South Korea, and the Czech Republic in both speed and cost of broadband internet, and Google wants to change that.

Google Fiber started in 2010 as something of an experiment: a way to show the world what high-speed internet could look like and, hopefully, spur more investment from the country’s broadband providers. But after launching its service in Kansas City in 2012, the company seems to have realized that it will take a lot more than a single testbed to kickstart a revolution in broadband speeds and Google chairman Eric Schmidt vowed to bring the service to more cities. “It’s actually not an experiment; we’re actually running it as a business,” he told the New York Times that year.

In 2013, Google announced its second metro-area, Austin, and acquired an existing fiber service in Provo, Utah.

If nothing else, the threat of Google Fiber expansion is already spurring more investment from competitors. Companies like AT&T have announced new fiber services in Austin, while smaller providers are hoping to stake their ground cities before Google arrives. And that’s just what we need now.