March 4, 2010 02:53
The capital city of Kansas, Topeka, has been renamed ‘Google, Kansas’ for the current month. The name change was announced Monday in a formal proclamation by the city’s mayor But Bunten. But the name change is unofficial and just for the month of March. A CNNTech report about the unusual move quoted Bunten as saying, "It's just fun. We're having a good time of it. There's a lot of good things that are going on in our city.”
What actually drove the mayor into taking this bizarre step was Google’s new “Fiber for Communities” program in which the web giant plans to install new internet connections at surprise locations. These connections will offer the chosen few communities over 1 gigabit per second of data transfer speeds that’s over 100 times faster than usual. Bunten, who himself is an internet novice keeping assistants for taking care of his emails, web search and other online communications, firmly believes that Google’s program will greatly benefit the younger residents of Kansas’ capital city.
Other U.S. cities are also elbowing for a spot in Google’s new “Fiber for Communities” program but none so far has gone such far as Topeka in this effort. According to the CNN report, cities have until March 26 to tell Google they're interested in the venture. Google says it will pick one or more cities for the pilot project. "We'll offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people," Google says in an online post. According to the web giant, the internet speeds are not on par with global standard and apparently Google is stepping up to fix things itself by means of the new broadband cable.
Bunten hopes that renaming Topeka to Google for a month will increase its chances to getting picked by Google for the program. While Bunten has kept his hopes high, Google declined to comment on whether it's taking the whole "Google, Kansas" thing seriously.