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Could Google resurrect former Harvard Motorola plant?

HARVARD, ILL — Harvard officials have jumped on the bandwagon of communities hoping to be a test site for Google's ultra-high speed internet project.

Their hope is that the upgrade would spur interest in the 1.5 million-square-foot former Motorola facility. At one time, the facility employed more than 5,000 people, but closed in 2003 only six years after opening.

Called Google Fiber for Communities, the network would deliver data at 1 gigabit per second to homes and businesses. That would be roughly 50 to 300 times faster than the DSL, cable and fiber-optic networks that connect most U.S. homes to the Internet today.

“This would be an asset that could help make the Motorola building more marketable, it might attract companies,” Harvard City Administrator David Nelson told the Northwest Herald.

Google has not said how many cities it intends to serve, but communities throughout the country are jumping on the bandwagon.

Madison officials say the Google Fiber network could bring more than 1,000 jobs and $97 million in infrastructure investment to the city.

Mayor Dave Cieslewicz told the Wisconsin State Journal the city has a "tech-savvy, engaged population" and is already home to a Google office.

Google says it's looking for wide community support and readiness. The company says it doesn't want to spend time dealing with right-of-way issues or objections from neighborhoods that aren't crazy about having Google tear up streets to install its network.

So local officials are going out of their way to show some love.

Wearing just a T-shirt and shorts, Superior Mayor Don Ness strolled to the end of a dock jutting into frigid Lake Superior. He grinned, waved his arms to a cheering crowd, and jumped in.

"I've laid down the gauntlet!" Ness cried, shivering and dripping as he emerged from the lake in a video posted on YouTube. "All right, you other mayors! You want Google Fiber, you jump in Lake Superior!"

Topeka (Kansas), informally renamed itself "Google, Kansas," for the month of March. A group in Baltimore launched a Web site that uses Google mapping to plot the location of more than 1,000 residents and gives their reasons for wanting the service. Other cities in pursuit include Cincinnati, Portland (Oregon), Grand Rapids (Michigan), Rochester (New York), Baton Rouge (Louisiana). More than 200 groups on Facebook are pushing different cities and counties for Google's broadband plan.

"People are hungry for faster speeds and improved Internet access," Google spokesman Dan Martin said.

Google said several thousand citizens have nominated their communities since it announced plans in mid-February to build the network in a handful of areas. The company has set a March 26 deadline for city governments and citizens to express interest, and Google plans to announce winners by the end of the year. Martin said Google can't say when it will start building the new networks but hopes to start soon.

Google says it's not interested in dominating or even grabbing a sizable chunk of the broadband market. Instead it says it hopes phone and cable companies will learn lessons from the experimental network that will help them hurry the rollout of their own faster systems. It also hopes to provide a testbed for online video and other advanced applications that require a lot of bandwidth.