Third US city to get Google FTTP service

Google is proposing to buy a fibre to the home service provider in the city of Provo, Utah, to bring its own gigabit residential network offering to the town.

In the previous two Google Fibre cities, Kansas City and Austin, the search engine giant is building a fibre to the home network instead of using an existing one.

iProvo was proposed in the late nineties as a public-private partnership. The first deployment begain in 2001 and construction of a city-wide network started in 2004 and was completed two years later.

However, soon after launch, iProvo ran into financial problems as costs were high and uptake low. Provo City Council sold iProvo in 2008 to another provider, through a publicly financed loan. The deal fell over however, and Provo took the provider back last year and leased it out to another company.

Kevin Lo, the general manager of Google Fibre, blogs that while the announcement by Provo mayor John Curtis had already been made, the deal had not yet been approved. The Provo City Council will vote on the deal on April 23 US time.

If the deal is approved Google Fibre intends to start connecting customers later this year, providing a gigabit service for paying customers and 5 Megabits free connectivity for seven years, for install charges only.

Provo City had just over 110,000 inhabitants in 2010 with an overall metro population of 525,000. Part of the reason Google Fibre is coming to Provo is the "Silicon Slopes" agglomeration of hundreds of tech companies and startups, Lo writes.