As of early April, Google told press in Kansas City that it would stick to its target of bringing fiber service to the city within the first half of 2012.
While the search giant has been a bit reticent to offer details about what precisely the level of service will be, who will have access to it, and how much it will cost, one thing remains clear: fiber is freakin’ fast. It’s expected to raise the average level of connectivity by about two orders of magnitude, with speeds reaching up to one gigabit per second.
A new report in BusinessWeek suggests that Hollywood may be a little worried that this will enable rampant piracy, but it could nonetheless be beneficial for studios who know how to take advantage of it.
"We want to reinforce that higher speeds could be a great opportunity for consumers, and that's the bottom line," Howard Gantman, spokesman for the Motion Picture Association of America, told Ars on Friday. "There are problems that can, in terms of [an] increase of digital piracy, come with that, but we are hopeful that efforts can be made... to address digital piracy."
A spokesperson for Viacom declined to comment.
Google has not said whether it will participate in the "six strikes" scheme between the country's major ISP players, which was announced last year.
Meanwhile, 180 miles to the north, in Iowa, Google is also getting busy. This week, the company announced plans to build a new $300 million data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa, just outside of Omaha. This facility is expected to continue to do what another Council Bluffs site did when it came online in 2009: host Gmail, Google Maps, Google+, and of course, search.
Given Google’s FCC filing from earlier this year, that Iowa station may also serve as a future IP video facility to be used in conjunction with Kansas City's fiber service.
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