San Antonio confirmed as Google Fiber's next stop

6 August 2015 by Steve Blum
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San Antonio opens the gate for Google.

San Antonio has officially gone from being a “potential” Google Fiber city to an “upcoming” one. Google made the announcement yesterday in its blog

Fast growing cities need Internet speeds that can keep up with their progress. For the 1.4 million residents of San Antonio, one of the biggest and fastest growing cities in the country, this is truer than ever. Which is why, today, we’re proud to announce that Google Fiber is coming to San Antonio—the largest Fiber city to date…

Soon, we’ll enter the design phase of building our fiber network in San Antonio. We’ll work closely with city leaders over the next several months to plan the layout of over 4,000 miles of fiber-optic cables—enough to stretch to Canada and back—across the metro area. This is no small task, and it will take some time, but we can’t wait to get started.

San Antonio is the seventh largest city in the U.S., according to CityMayors.com, with a population of 1.4 million within the city limits (don’t confuse city population with total metro area size – the Atlanta and Charlotte metros are both bigger and both Google Fiberhoods). The next biggest city on Google’s “current” fiber city list is Austin, just up I-35 and ranked 11th with 843,000 people.

It’s been a busy week for Google. It moved forward with Phoenix – even a bigger city and metro area than San Antonio – and expanded its Texas bootprint.

San Antonio was one of the fastest and most enthusiastic cities to embrace Google. The Public Utilities Commission of Texas trimmed the bureaucratic overhead to near zero. If you’re wondering why Google went to San Antonio and not your city (yet), look no further for an answer.