Pittsburgh vies for high-speed Google connection

One-gigabit Internet speeds might be coming to Pittsburgh soon. The service is either coming… One-gigabit Internet speeds might be coming to Pittsburgh soon. The service is either coming here or, one of about 1,100 other cities across the country.

Google, the Internet search giant, announced on its public blog earlier this month that it intends to create a network with 1-gigabit-per-second speed — several times what is available through other companies — for a U.S. city.

Pittsburgh and other cities across the country jumped into the contest, “Google Fiber for Communities,” for a chance to win the high-speed network. How Google will choose it’s U.S. host city is unknown.

Despite the mystery, the mayor of Duluth, Minn., jumped into Lake Superior as part of the city’s bid for the Google network. Topeka, Kan., renamed itself “Google, Kansas” for the month of March.

Jake Hubert, a Google spokesman, said the company will announce its target communities by the end of the year. Hubert directed further questions to the company’s website.

Chancellor Mark Nordenberg spoke in support of Pittsburgh’s bid in late March. He posted a message on my.pitt.edu and sent an e-mail encouraging students to recommend Pittsburgh for the network.

But Pitt provides the Internet access for the dormitories and the University itself, so all of that speed won’t be coming to a Pitt dorm, even if the city does win.

Morgan Kelly, a spokesman for Pitt, said that if Google’s network came to Pittsburgh, it would bring no change to students in the dorms. Neither would the super-fast Internet connection come to the University, as a whole.

Pitt operates as an Internet service provider for the dormitories and for the University, according to the Computing Services and Systems Development website.

As for why the chancellor put a note on my.pitt.edu about the contest, Kelly said it was to express greater support for the city.

“It’s the same as putting a ‘Go Steelers’ sign in your window,” Kelly said. “Even though you don’t get to share their Super Bowl trophy.”

Joanna Doven, a spokeswoman for Mayor Luke Ravenstahl, said in March that the city wasn’t looking for anything that drastic yet. Something like “Googlesburgh” is not in the works.

Ravenstahl declared March 26 — the contest’s registration deadline — “Google Day” in Pittsburgh. People lined up on Forbes Avenue, Downtown, that day to spell out “Google,” holding signs saying “Reserved For Google” with a lawn chair on it.

The sign, which is also on the website, serves as the city’s logo for the contest. The lawn chair is something distinctly Pittsburgh — Doven said it comes from the practice of Pittsburghers putting lawn chairs on street parking spots to reserve the spot for them.

Technically, this practice is illegal, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Doven said the city chose the logo because administrators thought Pittsburghers would “get it.” Those who didn’t understand, she said, would be drawn to the website to find out why.

The city is focusing on “raising awareness” in the community about the contest, she said.

The city launched the website in conjunction with Pitt, Carnegie Mellon, UPMC and Visit Pittsburgh.

Fiber-optic Internet connections offered by Verizon reach 50 megabytes per second, according to Verizon’s website.

Google would offer the service at a “competitive price” to at least 50,000 people and potentially 500,000, according to the company’s blog.

Most of the benefit would come to the neighborhoods around Pitt, said Jay Graham, a technician at Pitt’s Computer Services and Systems Development. Some neighborhoods still have DSL or even dial-up connections that connect to the University network.

The updated connections could provide faster Internet speeds, he said, and allow people to work more easily.

While the University’s network would not necessarily benefit from winning the new high-speed network, Graham said, he would “love it” if he got the connection at home.

Whether the connection could come to any particular neighborhood, like Oakland, Graham said it would not be up to the University. Should Pittsburgh win, Google would decided where in the city to place the network, he said.

Graham called Google’s contest a “last-mile service” that would not necessarily add to Pitt’s network.

“Essentially it would be running alongside a parallel network,” Graham said. “It wouldn’t buy us much.”

The technology for Google’s contest is similar to Pitt’s network, he said. Pitt has a 10 gigabit-per-second “backbone” to its network that is shared across the campus, he said. The dormitories on campus share a 500 megabit-per-second connection, and the speed for each Pitt student would depend upon how many people were using the network at the time.

CMU’s network is in a similar situation to Pitt’s, Phillip Leeman, associate dean of strategic initiatives for Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, said in April.

“We already have a fairly fast connection,” he said. “Students should think about the contest as citizens of the city.”

Off-campus students could see huge benefits from the contest, as could the city as a whole, he said.

The contest, as he understood it, was “focused on homes, and most of the connections would be at homes.”

Leeman said that several CMU graduates have been recruited into the Google office in Pittsburgh, on Forbes Avenue. That office was successful enough, Leeman said, that it would be moving to a larger office soon.

An e-mail from Minnie Ingersoll, a product manager on Google’s alternative access team, did not say whether the presence of a Google office in a city would heighten its chances of winning.

Ingersoll did not explain Google’s selection process, saying only that the company is looking “for the right community partners.”

Cities in the contest in Pennsylvania, according to Google’s website, include Philadelphia, Harrisburg, State College, Erie, Bethlehem and nearby Venango County. Morgantown, W.Va.,  and Youngstown, Ohio, also entered the contest.

Some of the other cities that have entered the contest publicly include Topeka — no longer “Google” — Kan.; Duluth, Minn.; Sarasota, Fla.; Peoria, Ill.; and Greenville, S.C.

Greenville’s public display — with a larger crowd — was similar to Pittsburgh’s. Hundreds of people lined up with different colored lights at night to spell, “Google” on Main Street in Greenville.

Leeman said Pittsburgh’s size, which the Census Bureau estimated at about 300,000 in 2006, put the city in “a sweet spot” for Google.

Google was also looking for a community that would make an “interesting use of the connection,” Leeman said.

“This would be revolutionary,” Leeman said. Carnegie Mellon would make sure that the connection “wouldn’t be just for downloading movies quickly.”