City to work with web giant to explore bringing residents Internet access up to 100 times faster than basic broadband speeds

Mayor Ed Rieker today announced the City of Avondale Estates is on a short list of nine metro Atlanta cities working with Google to explore the possibility of bringing the ultra-high-speed Google Fiber broadband network to the City.

“We are excited to be working with Google Fiber to potentially bring ultra-high-speed Internet access to Avondale Estates,” Mayor Rieker said. “Implementing abundant, high-speed broadband access will encourage economic development and allow the City to become a test bed for new technology and ideas that have the potential to improve our daily lives.”

Today’s average American broadband speed is 9.8 megabits per second. In contrast, Google Fiber could bring Avondale Estates residents access to “gigabit” Internet connections up to 1,000 megabits per second—or up to 100 times faster than basic broadband.

Avondale Estates in April 2010 passed a resolution to respond to Google’s “Think Big With a Gig” challenge, which invited U.S. cities to tell Google if they’d want the company to build a new, gigabit-speed network in their community. Avondale Estates joined with four other cities under the name of “Atlanta Urban Area Partnership for Google Fiber” to craft a joint response and collectively bolster their chances of bringing the technology to the area. Watch a video about the partnership.

As a Fellow working directly with technology startups