A day after unveiling a health bar called “Google Fiber” as an April Fool’s joke, Google provided an update on the real Google Fiber project.
The company has installed more than 100 miles of backbone fiber in Kansas City, KS, and its sister city in Missouri for its FTTH rollout, according to an interview with John Toccalino, a manager on the fiber project that Google posted on its Community Fiber blog. It also has begun construction of an unspecified number of “Google Fiber Huts” that will serve as aggregation nodes.
Toccalino revealed that Google plans to architect the network in a home-run configuration. “[E]very home that has Google Fiber service will have their very own fiber-optic cable that directly connects all the way back to the Internet backbone,” he is quoted as saying.
About half of the fiber huts have been constructed, Toccalino asserts. However, he did not specify when hut construction would end nor when Google would begin hooking customers to the backbone.
The fiber deployment is slightly behind the schedule Google predicted when it first revealed its plans to bring FTTH services to Kansas City, KS. This had led to assertions that Google had run into problems gaining access to the utility poles on which it planned to use to string its cable (see "Google FTTH in Kansas City hits pole attachment snag"). Any such problems appear to be a thing of the past, particularly once AT&T agreed to grant Google installers access to its poles.
