Kansas City Was First to Embrace Google Fiber, Now Its Broadband Future Is 'TBD'

Five years after hooking up its first Kansas City customers, expansion of Google Fiber has come to a screeching halt. Thousands of customers in KC who had pre-registered for guaranteed service when Google Fiber made it to their neighborhood were given their money back earlier in 2017, and told they may never get hooked up. Google Fiber cycled through two CEOs in the last 10 months, lost multiple executives, and has started laying off employees. Plans to expand Google Fiber to eight other American cities halted late in 2016, leaving the fate of the project up in the air. I recently asked Rachel Hack Merlo, the Community Manager for Google Fiber in Kansas City, about the future of the expanding the project service there, and she told me it was "TBD." Kansas City expected to become Google's glittering example of a futuristic gig-city: Half a decade later, there are examples of how Fiber benefitted KC, and stories about how it fell short. Thousands of customers will likely never get the chance to access the infrastructure they rallied behind, and many communities are still without any broadband access at all. Many are now left wondering: is that it?