Celebration FL Wants Google Gigabit Broadband

The town of Celebration FL has a unique history. It’s the town that Disney originally provided the land for, designed, built, and operated. Several books have been written about it. Disney no longer operates the town but they continue to occupy most of the office buildings.

When the town was originally built, it was promoted as being very networked. In the mid-1990’s it held the world’s record for “most connected town” in the country. SmartCity, the firm that supports the phone and network infrastructure at Disney World, also wired up Celebration and still provides the phone service. Cable broadband and television stations are provided by Comcast, in partnership to the SmartCity infrastructure. SmartCity provides telephone and DSL. All of it buried in ground. This was back in 1992. As nearby cities today get high-speed cable broadband and FIOS, those services are not including the town of Celebration because of it’s private infrastructure. Residents have sometimes been caught by Comcast finger-pointing to avoid responsibility when trying to resolve service problems.

I live in this area and my Internet bandwidth usage is beginning to have some concern. I “cut the cable-TV cord” recently, so all of my television, movies, news, conversation, downloads, and my VOIP phone comes to me via my broadband connection. I’ve already neared Comcast’s 250gig limit once, and I haven’t started my live streams yet.

So it’s very exciting on many levels that Google may offer a solution.

Enter Google

Google is offering a ‘contest’, where they will wire up a few small towns with their new Gigabit broadband service, and a letter went out to Celebration residents encouraging them to participate:

Celebration Residential Owner’s 
Association, Inc.
Celebration Non-Residential Owner’s Association, 
Inc.
Submissions are due by 
March 26. Every submittal increases 
Celebration’s 
chance.
Google Fiber Initiative Town Meeting
Tue, March 16; 7:00 p.m.

851 Celebration Avenue 
Given the famous nature of the town (it was also a 
premier town for the Segway scooter), and it’s 
proximity to Disney World, both Celebration and Google 
would benefit from this arrangement. As would I 

Syndicated 2010-03-15 14:24:05 from Keith Barrett Online » Technology