Think Big, Topeka!

Well, here’s something to get excited about in Topeka. There’s a movement growing – and it’s already bigger than anything similar from any other community – that if they meet their goal, Topeka will likely experience a renaissance of new business, new jobs, new economic growth, and all of the great stuff that comes with it. Put all that together and suddenly Topeka’s image problem goes away.

It stems from Google. The undisputed king of Internet Search likes to take their billions of dollars and do interesting things with it. Sometimes those projects are innovative, like Voice and Apps. Sometimes, they just take a common service and make it free or cheap, like Gmail.  Sometimes those things involve being like Microsoft.  If you’re feeling Morbidly Curious™, leave me a comment and I’ll share my Google vitriol.

Well, their latest project is at the heart of the aforementioned movement: Google is looking to pick a few communities in which to test rolling out their own fiber optic-based Internet service.  Now at this point you might be thinking “So what?  I already have a cable modem; it’s fast.”  Let me put some numbers on this, and it’s OK if the numbers are arbitrary or don’t make sense.  Compare them to one another based on what you know about using the Internet:

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