Last month, Google announced that it was planning to build a 1 gigabit fiber network somewhere in the United States that it would initially test with 50,000 participants, with potentially up to 500,000 participants to be included at a later time. The company encouraged state, county and city officials, as well as members of the public to nominate their communities by answering its request for information.
Today was the deadline for those submissions and Google has released some statistics: it received 1,100 responses from governments and over 194,000 responses from individuals. It also highlighted some of things various communities have done in an attempt to court the company, including the city of Topeka, Kansas attempting to temporarily rename itself as Google, public rallies held in Greenville, South Carolina and Peoria, Illinois, as well as various videos on YouTube and Facebook groups.
Google will now focus on narrowing down the list of possible locations for the network, which will entail visiting the locations, meeting with local officials and consulting with third-party organizations. It will make a decision by the end of the year.
Google has mapped the responses:
The small dots represent government responses and the large dots represent locations where more than 1,000 individuals submitted responses.
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