The big announcement in Utah yesterday was that Google Fiber is coming to Provo. Instead of building out completely new infrastructure, Google will be purchasing the existing fiber network in Provo. From there they will be upgrading it to be in line with other Google Fiber installs.
I live about a 30 minute drive north of Provo, so this won’t make it to my home. Though Comcast recently upped my connection to 50Mbps down, so my current connection isn’t horrible. I wonder if Comcast knew this announcement from Google was coming and wanted to preempt some of the complaints from users.
The other thing that I wonder about is the NSA datacenter a short hop north of Provo. Was this a motivating factor on the either side? No idea. Would be nice to know if Google Fiber in Provo ends up peering with the NSA data center.
Speaking of peering, there are a few others in the area that would probably love to have a network peering arrangement with Google Fiber in Provo. C7 has a data center in Bluffdale ( north of Provo and not far from the NSA data center ) that apparently has a hefty number Twitter servers. Bluehost has a data center in Provo. Those are the two I could think of off the top of my head, there are data centers in the area who would be interested as well.
This is just the beginning of Google Fiber in Provo, and even though I won’t have access to it, I’ll be watching closely to see how it develops.