Google Fiber is looking for testers in the Austin market to see what they can do with 20 Gig Internet.
The applications can be drug development, virtual reality, artificial intelligent humanoid robot assistants, flying cars, or something else.
According to Google, an organization or company might be an excellent candidate to test a symmetrical 20 Gig connection if it is downloading or uploading massive datasets, conducting research that needs significantly more bandwidth, or doing future-focused technology that needs lots of bandwidth.
“We are interested in finding firms that are doing things I haven’t even thought of yet,” said Nick Saporito, head of Multi-gig & Commercial Product.
Google launched a test for its 20 Gig product with the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s School of Science and Engineering.
“They’ve been doing a lot of things at their School of Science and Engineering from tackling big data sets to making virtual reality less virtual and more reality,” Saporito wrote in a blog post.
“But we know that’s just the beginning (like our recently launched 5 Gig and 8 Gig products),” Saporito wrote. “That’s why we’re looking for eight more organizations — businesses, non-profits, educational institutions — to help test 20 Gig in Austin, Huntsville, Raleigh-Durham, and Salt Lake City.”
Austin currently has 1 Gig and 2 Gig products, and Kansas City has 5 Gig and 8 Gig available, Saporito said.
“Texas markets will get them later this year,” he said.
Google Fiber is currently available in Austin and San Antonio. Google began offering Google Fiber in Austin in December of 2014, and a year later, it announced plans to bring Google Fiber to San Antonio.
“We are very aggressively expanding the market in San Antonio and Austin and in Texas,” Saporito said. “We are very happy with how our Texas markets perform.”
“The 20 Gig is really a nice experiment for us,” Saporito said. “We have the technical capability to do it so why not test it out.”
The 20 Gig experiment is designed to generate as many technical learnings as possible, Saporito said. The second piece is understanding what future-looking use cases are for 20 Gig. Markets, he said.
“What’s coming down the pike in terms of Internet usage?” he said. “That’s really what we’re after here.”
Apply to be a 20 Gig tester here