Good news for those of you who live in Austin. Google will be launching its fiber network in the south and southeast sections of the city starting this December. From there, the company will continue to deploy Google Fiber through other parts of the town in stages.

Google’s strategy for which areas are designated for its gigabit network will be dependent on a sign-up process. Areas will be divided into neighborhoods and those that hit a certain goal, specified by Google, will gain access to the service. While neighborhoods that fail to reach the goal will not have access to it.

Each neighborhood, consisting of a few hundred houses, will be served by a single fiber hut where Google’s network meets the metro network. While details regarding pricing are still forthcoming, head of Google Fiber in Austin Mark Strama revealed that there will be a $300 construction fee for connecting a home to the gigabit network. There will also be a basic 5 Mbps service as part of the construction fee that will have no additional monthly fee.


As to the scope of the task laid out before Google, the company will lay out 3,000 miles of network in Austin from scratch. In addition, it has surveyed 10,000 telephone poles, with plans to survey 50,000 total, and will collect 10 to 20 data points from each to help determine how to deploy its aerial portion of the service.

Google Fiber is only available, so far, in a few places such as Kansas City, Kansas and Provo, Utah. Back in February, the company announced that it would also be bringing Google Fiber to an additional 34 cities sometime in the future.