Like Manassas, the Allentown area is surrounded by fiber that PPL laid to facilitate communications between offices and substations.

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One area, he says, is fiber optics.

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Merely hours after Google and the city of Austin jointly made clear that Google Fiber would be hitting up local homes in mid-2014, Ma Bell has made public its "intent" to built a 1 Gigabit fiber network in the same area.

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As John Pletz recently laid out in Crains, Chicago already has more installed fiber optic cables than nearly any metro area in the world.

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Perhaps the most ambitious way that Google is making the experience of the internet faster is its ambitious Fiber program that it has rolled out in the Kansas City area.

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Instead of lagging the world in this critical area, we would quickly lead it, just as we did with microchips, fiber optics and--until recently--the Internet.

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This seems to be further evidence that Google does not just view Kansas City as a sandbox to experiment on the rollout of its 1 gigabit, fiber-to-the-home product, but a potential new area of business.

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