Google's Broadband Network Coming To 850 Stanford University Residences

Earlier this year, Google announced that it would be deploying its own “experimental” fiber-optic network to at least 50,000 homes, perhaps as many as 500,000. The search giant received a flux of applications from communities across the country, who went at great lengths to show that their city deserved to be Google’s guinea pig. Today, Google is announcing that it has partnered with Stanford University to build an ultra-high speed broadband network to the university’s Residential Subdivision, a group of approximately 850 faculty and staff owned homes on campus.

The trial will offer the residents Internet speeds up to 1 gigabit per second, which Google says more than 100 times faster than what most people have access to today. Google will begin the implementation in early 2011.

For those cities who applied to be Google’s test community, not to worry. Google says this experiment is separate from the community selection process for Google Fiber. The winner of this selection should be announced within the next few months.

This small deployment is a test for Google to see how it can implement the broadband network at a larger to scale, to up to 500,000 homes. So essentially Stanford University residents will be the real guinea pig so that chosen community will face a higher quality implementation.

Google says the choice to build the network in the Stanford community was based on the University’s openness to the experiment and the ease of the residential layout for the project. Of course, another key factor is the location of the residential area, which is a hop, skip and a jump away from Google’s Mountain View campus.