Glorious Bandwidth: Seattle Announces Deal to Bring Gigabit Fiber to the Home, 12 Neighborhoods Announced

by Joshua Gulick — Friday, December 14, 2012, 11:00 AM EDT

If you live in Seattle and you’re a heavy bandwidth user, here’s some good news: you may be getting a fiber connection right to your house in the near-ish future. Seattle and the University of Washington have teamed up with Gigabit Squared to test a public fiber network that will bring high-speed Internet to homes and businesses in several test neighborhoods. This is part of Seattle’s Seafi initiative.

Seattle Neighborhoods To Receive Fiber Connections

Image credit: Gigabit Seattle

The plan is to also bring Gigabit broadband to multi-family housing. So far, 12 neighborhoods have been selected, including some areas at and around the University of Washington. These demonstration neighborhoods encompass more than 50,000 businesses and homes. Gigabit is touting huge speed boosts for these neighborhoods – up to 1,000 times the speeds they’re experiencing now. The long-term plan is to eventually have fiber transmitters on 38 buildings in Seattle for Gigabit wireless broadband.

If you live nearby and want info about when fiber might be coming to your neighborhood, you can check out Gigabit’s website. Gigabit says it will give priority to neighborhoods that show more interest.

Tags: Broadband, Internet, fiber, Seattle

Joshua Gulick

Josh cut his teeth (and hands) on his first PC upgrade in 2000 and was instantly hooked on all things tech. He took a degree in English and tech writing with him to Computer Power User Magazine and spent years reviewing high-end workstations and gaming systems, processors, motherboards, memory and video cards. His enthusiasm for PC hardware also made him a natural fit for covering the burgeoning modding community, and he wrote CPU’s “Mad Reader Mod” cover stories from the series’ inception until becoming the publication editor for Smart Computing Magazine. A few years ago, he returned to his first love, reviewing smoking-hot PCs and components, for HotHardware. When he’s not agonizing over benchmark scores, Josh is either running (very slowly) or spending time with family.

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