O'Brien: As Google gets ready to launch its gigabit network, Kansas City asks: Now what?

KANSAS CITY -- Residents here won the high-tech lottery last year when Google announced it would build its experimental high-speed fiber network in this sprawling Midwest community.

In retrospect, getting picked for Google Fiber, as it is known, was the easy part. Last week, on a visit to the region where I grew up, I found Kansas City (actually, two cities, one in Kansas and one in Missouri) grappling with a far more complex challenge:

What to do with it?

In the most optimistic scenarios, Google Fiber -- which will be one of the world's fastest broadband networks with speeds of 1 gigabit, more than 100 times as fast as the average broadband connection -- has the potential to make the two Kansas Cities the most entrepreneurial place in the world, the center of a health care revolution, and a leader in education reform.

But along with frustration over delays in the launch, the project has also bred anxiety that it will widen the digital divide or overwhelm the cities with a flood of new high-tech immigrants who drive up the cost of living.

Perhaps the greatest fear, though, is that Google Fiber will change nothing, that somehow the two cities will squander this moment, when the eyes of the world are watching, to invent the future.

"Speed in and of itself doesn't necessarily guarantee you anything," said Mike Burke, a former mayoral candidate in Kansas City, Mo., who is now co-chairman of the Mayors' Bistate Innovations

Team, one of many local fiber planning efforts. "It's a tool. The question now is: What can we do with this tool to achieve the things we want for our community?"

The biggest problem in answering the question is that Google has kept locals in the dark about the project's details.

How much will Google Fiber cost? When will it be launched? Even elected officials at the highest levels don't know. Google officials have only said there will be a "major announcement" this summer.

What they have promised is that the cost will be comparable to the price for a typical broadband connection. The service will be primarily available to residential homes, along with some community organizations like schools and libraries.

"This is the first time we've done a project like this, on this scale," noted Jenna Wandres, a Google representative. "We're doing everything we can to get it right."

Getting things right includes mundane challenges. Because it is selling Google Fiber, it must work out marketing messages, create customer support systems, and study pricing options.

Trickiest of all: learning how to deal with humans.

During a recent presentation at the local Maker Faire, Rachel Hack, a Kansas City area native who was hired last summer as community manager for Google Fiber, said:

"This is a new business model for us. We're coming to your house. We're sending someone to drill a hole in your wall. What does it feel like to interact with a Google person?"

These details matter, because it's not necessarily clear to many folks exactly what they would do with Google Fiber.

This hit me while visiting a friend from high school, Heather Wood, in Kansas City, Kan.

She has broadband now, and says because her husband works at home sometimes, it would probably be nice to have a faster connection for him to send files back and forth. Still, she says: "I'm not sure why we need a gigabit."

At the same time, she's excited at what Google Fiber might do for the region.

"There is so much unrealized potential here," she said. "If you were an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, you could come here and buy a house for $40,000 -- and I mean a nice house -- and start a little company there and have the fastest network in the world. It just seems like this could be a real game changer."

But beyond building the network, Google has made it clear it's up to the community to figure out how to make such things happen.

So this is when the cities need to let loose their imaginations.

Will Kansas City be the place that spawns the gigabit era's equivalent of YouTube and Facebook? Could every senior be linked 24 hours a day by video to their doctor? Will every tech company in the world set up shop here just to experiment with this radical connectivity speed?

The good news for Kansas City is that plenty of people seem eager to tackle these questions, just as Google hoped they would. Several official and ad hoc groups have emerged to explore ways the region can work together across topics such as education, health care, entrepreneurship, government and neighborhoods.

In May, the Mayors' Bistate Innovations Team released a 42-page report that maps out opportunities and offers a blueprint for taking advantage of Google Fiber. What impressed me most about the document, and gave me hope that Kansas City will get this right, is that the authors clearly know that technology will not magically make all their dreams come true and solve all these challenges.

Rather, the key is people: getting them to work together, training them, and making sure everyone is included in this digital bounty. "It's about sociology, not technology," the report says.

That last item is particularly important to Wendy Wilson, executive director of the Rosedale Development Association, a 16-square-mile community in Kansas City, Kan. Wilson worries many residents in the diverse and lower-income community won't be able to connect, creating an even greater gulf with counterparts in the more prosperous Kansas City, Mo.

"How do we get everyone online and into the digital age?" Wilson said. "Because if we don't, it will make the digital divide worse."

Google hopes the project will spur efforts to find ways to bring more people online, as well as to build such networks across the country. Kansas City understands that if that happens, then the window in which the cities have an advantage over the rest of the world could close quickly.

"This is the question that keeps me up every night," said Cameron Cushman, manager in the entrepreneurship program at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, one of the cities' largest philanthropic organizations. "Great, we're going to have an advantage on every other city in the world. Now, how do we make Kansas City the most entrepreneurial place in the world?"

Contact Chris O'Brien at 415-298-0207 or cobrien@mercurynews.com. Follow him at Twitter.com/obrien and read his blog posts at www.siliconbeat.com.

Source: http://www.mercurynews.com/rss/ci_20973070?source=rss

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