More than 1,000 cities, towns and other government-style entities submitted apps to Google hoping to convince them to put in super-fast Fiber-To-The-Home networks in their areas. It’s actually 1,077 areas to be exact; 39 right here in Michigan.
If you have no idea what I’m talking about, go here for deets.
Since then, Google’s been pretty quiet about its plans, its timeline, even its criteria for selecting a partner city. Company reps say they’ll let everybody know by the end of the year. Standard wisdom suggests they’ll probably make site visits to some finalists before then.
Meanwhile, there’s more than enough speculation to go round.
Just recently, FiberforAll.org, a site run by a marketing company out of Sarasota, has taken to ranking the various efforts. These are based mostly on rates of social media support.
We're number 12, near the bottom.
Good ol’ Grand Rapids is topping pretty much every chart. They’re number one in terms of percent of population supporting the effort as well as just straight numbers. They’re also one of the top five cities still showing increased support for the effort.
Kalamazoo isn’t doing too poorly though. We rank number 12 in terms of percentage support, with 7.58% of our population having joined the Facebook group. We’re not as strong in raw numbers, but then we haven’t gone nuts like some other places.
The site is promising to update the support rankings daily.
