Google, one of the largest growing companies in the world, is looking to create a experimental fiber internet service for test communities up to 500,000 users in size. This experimental internet would be one-hundred times faster than the standard broadband offered locally, with an estimated 1 gigabyte download speed. Grand Rapids appears to be an ideal candidate for Google's experiment and has a lot of support towards the project. Google plans on having an active decision in the process, but the best way to support the possible upgrade is through the official site. Grand Rapids just recently setup a wifi network through WiMax and was a test market for a fiber ring years ago, but the speeds currently offered are not much better than the typical cable package at a much more expensive price, hundreds to over a thousand dollars per month. Experts expect Google's prices to not be any better. The project is estimated to cost half a billion dollars, which would yield prices in the several thousand dollars range. However, it's not too far off to consider Grand Rapids as a test choice for the California based Google considering they already have a center in Ann Arbor.
Google's internet is far from the only news the over a decade old multi-billion dollar corporation. Google this past Wednesday donated two million dollars to Wikipedia.com, the online encyclopedia. Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder had this to say about the donation "[Wikipedia] [is] one of the greatest triumphs of the Internet…this vast repository of community-generated content is an invaluable resource to anyone who is online." The two million dollars is a fifth of Wikipedia's target revenue for the year.
With all that has been said about Google, they just keep growing. With the offer of their first droid phone through Motorola to the countless internet services they provide for free, many corporations are having a hard time competing with the big G. Microsoft and Yahoo! have announced a Search Alliance. The two companies are looking to merge efforts for the time being in an attempt to steal back some of the advertising power that Google has dominated. The companies hope to have their new searches up and running in the United States by the end of 2010 to the beginning of 2011.
References: GR hopes to be lab for Google, How Much Will Google's Fiber Network Cost?, Google Gives To Wikipedia, Wikipedia:Google, Search Alliance
