By James Rincon

Pflag Reporter

City staff is working to get Pflugerville wired.

Google has launched a nationwide contest for cities with populations between 50,000 and 500,000 to apply to become a “Fiber Community.”

The technology giant is keeping details about the when, where and how of the contest close to its chest, but what is known is that the cities chosen as test markets will become equipped with Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than are currently available.

“Lot of cities that are applying for this, so we don’t really know what [Google] is looking for. It’s pretty vague. It does say they’ll be offering the fiber network at an inexpensive rate,” city Communications Director Terri Waggoner said. “I know that its going to bring a very high speed Internet… Having this come in, our city would be very wired, and being in the area that we are with a lot of technology companies around us, it would be a really big honor to have something like that come here. It would be something for economic development and other such things.”

The Google Web site states that the Fiber Communities will be aimed to innovate ways to improve ultra-high speed Internet access by building and testing 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections.

“In the same way that the transition from dial-up to broadband made possible the emergence of online video and countless other applications, ultra high-speed bandwidth will lead to new innovations – including streaming high-definition video content, remote data storage, distance learning, real-time multimedia collaboration, and others that we cannot yet imagine,” a Google spokesperson said in an e-mail.

Waggoner said the city is filling out multiple questionnaires – one for city staff, one for City Council and on for residents.

“We don’t really know how they are going to pick the city they’re going to use,” Waggoner said. “And then there’s a bunch of questions asked about the city, like ‘how excited is your community about this coming to town?’ So they really what us to gauge what the community thinks.”

Austin IT Manager David Bunch said Google is probably looking for high-tech cities that can utilize the speedy connection to its fullest potential.

“Between Dell, Samsung right down the road, Nvidia’s got data centers here – there are just more companies than I can even bother listing that are in the area. We would see the benefits before other residents,” Bunch said.

Although Austin and Round Rock house tech giants in the Pflugerville area, both cities are submitting their own applications to Google to become a Fiber Community.

Despite the competition from high-tech neighbors, Bunch said it’s a win-win for Pflugerville if the network comes to the region.

“Google is probably looking on a bigger scale because this is a test environment. Say they don’t choose us first – we’d like them too, but say they don’t choose us first and they choose Austin or Round Rock, we’ll be right up there if they choose to expand this,” Bunch said. “We’ll be right there, and we’ve already completed this application and they already know that we’re interested, so all the more reason to come to this area if they’re interested. They can grow that market a little quicker if they choose to go that direction.”

Waggoner has posted a link to the resident application on the city’s Web site at cityofpflugerville.com/google.

She said community interest is imperative to Pflugerville’s chance to capitalize on this cutting-edge opportunity.

“I would love it if we had a huge significant amount of applications coming in from Pflugerville residents because that tells Google we mean business, we really want this to come.

The resident’s application asks why Google should build a fiber home network where you live and also encourages Web linking to supporting materials like Youtube videos as creative submissions.

“I don’t know how I get people to go make me Youtube videos for Google, but man, if they did, that would be awesome,” Waggoner said.

jrincon@pflugervillepflag.com