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Google Fiber maps out biggest deployment yet in San Antonio

The Texas expansion follows up Google Fiber's announcement last month to bring free Internet access to public housing residents.

Rachel King Staff Writer
Rachel King is a staff writer for ZDNet based in San Francisco.
Rachel King

gettyimages-san-antonio.jpg
Google plans to plant more than 4,000 miles of fiber-optic cables across the San Antonio, Texas. Getty Images/jld3 Photography

The Google Fiber road trip across America continues as the high-speed Internet service plots its biggest stop yet.

That would be San Antonio, Texas, which with approximately 1.4 million residents makes for the biggest Google Fiber target city to date.

Installations haven't started yet, but the head of Google Fiber in Texas, Mark Strama, said in a blog post on Wednesday that the Internet giant plans to "enter the design phase of building" soon.

The plan is to plant more than 4,000 miles of fiber-optic cables across the San Antonio metro area, which Strama quipped would be "enough to stretch to Canada and back."

The San Antonio deployment follows up Google Fiber's announcement last month to bring free Internet access to public housing residents.

As part of ConnectHome, a program launched by the White House and US Department of Housing and Urban Development, Google is also pledging to establish computer labs and provide computer skills training in each of its Fiber markets.

Before San Antonio, Google Fiber has been up and running in three cities -- Austin, Kansas City and Provo -- with expansion plans previously lined up for five more: Salt Lake City, Nashville, Atlanta, Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham. Additional potential sites include San Jose, Portland and Phoenix.

For the ConnectHome initiative, Google Fiber had committed to installing and providing free high-speed broadband in four communities: Atlanta, Durham, Nashville and Kansas City.

This story originally posted as "Google Fiber plots biggest deployment yet in San Antonio" on ZDNet.