GRAHA STUFF

Sometime this year, Google's supposed to name several communities in which it'll install high-speed broadband networks, and for the sake of not getting anyone's hopes up, we'll say right here that "sometime" is not now. But a site called Google Fiber for Communities did launch today so that everyone can stay informed and push for further progress.

This fiber network initiative is turning out to be a bigger deal than Google originally imagined. The search giant received almost 1,100 community responses and 200,000 requests from individuals, according to a new post on the Official Google Blog.

So Google Fiber for Communities will serve as a place "where you can learn more about fiber networks and keep up-to-date on our project," the post stated. Interestingly, the post then continued, "You'll also be able to advocate for common-sense federal and local policies that would help fiber deployments nationwide."

Google put together a little video to show how excited people are and applaud their enthusiasm, too (with one interesting line being "what we learn in our trial communities will benefit all communities").

Just don't worry that all of this adds up to a stall tactic. Google still intends to make its picks by the end of the year, meaning it shouldn't be too much longer before we find out what lucky towns and/or cities will see connection speeds of 1 gigabit per second.

The post simply explained, "[I]n the meantime, we hope this site helps to keep the conversation going."

Since we announced our plans to build experimental, ultra high-speed broadband networks, the response has been tremendous. Hundreds of communities and hundreds of thousands of individuals across the country have expressed their interest in the project. We're not going to be able to build in every interested community - our plan is to reach a total of at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people - but we hope to learn lessons from this experiment that will help improve Internet access everywhere.