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Up To Speed

The race for America’s fastest broadband speeds

The race for America’s fastest broadband speeds.

Last year Google selected Kansas City as the location for its first attempt to connect homes to its own fiber-optic network. Other than Kansas City, New York City is also trying to ramp up its Internet speeds to compete with cities like Amsterdam, Barcelona, Moscow, Singapore and Toronto. With this Internet speed race in full gear, where does Cincinnati stand? More from Next American City:

Here in Kansas City, Google is in the early stages of an experiment. The stated goal: To learn what there is to know about making high-speed broadband faster, cheaper and ubiquitous. Called Google Fiber, it’s the most ambitious fiber-to-the-home project in the country. Here in the geographic middle of America, at least this moment in time, these paired cities will have the fastest, broadest broadband network in the U.S.

For Kansas City, the dream is of a gigabit of connectivity in every pot, enough to bring into being remote medical screenings, digital coursework from anywhere in the world, fire departments equipped with 3-D building plans and immersive video gaming — enough to transform two mid-sized heartland cities into a 21st-century hub of the digital-age economy, a hotbed of innovation and growth.

By Randy A. Simes

Randy is an award-winning urban planner who founded UrbanCincy in May 2007. He grew up on Cincinnati’s west side in Covedale, and graduated from the University of Cincinnati’s nationally acclaimed School of Planning in June 2009. In addition to maintaining ownership and serving as the managing editor for UrbanCincy, Randy has worked professionally as a planning consultant throughout the United States, Korea and the Middle East. After brief stints in Atlanta and Chicago, he currently lives in the Daechi neighborhood of Seoul’s Gangnam district.