InstantnewsBellaire.com

The quest for ultra-high speed Internet brought out the silly side in cities all across the nation. One city leader jumped in a shark tank, and another plunged into 35-degree water. Bellaire took a much more tempered approach.

“We just submitted the application and let it speak for itself. There were a lot of silly things that took place, we just didn’t partake,” said Larry Parks, director of Bellaire’s Communication Technology Services department.

With visions of the future of Internet communications in mind, the city on Friday submitted an application to Google, beseeching the technology behemoth to choose the city of Bellaire for an experimental fiber optic network that would make Internet speeds up to 100 times faster than they are now.

But Bellaire has a lot of competition, including neighboring city West University Place. According to the Google Blog, by the application deadline the company had received more than 600 applications from cities, and more than 190,000 responses from individuals. All of them are begging and pleading Google to choose their cities for Google Fiber, a new project that is seeking locations for an experimental communications network.

“The interest has been pretty significant,” said Google spokeswoman Erin Fors.

Google Fiber would transfer information at 1 gigabyte-per-second, which is basically light speed compared to the typical 100 megabytes-per-second speeds available in the majority of the United States. One gigabyte is equal to 1,024 megabytes.

According to the company’s web site for the project, Google hopes eventually there will be universal ultra-high speed broadband networks across the country that will allow people to do previously unimagined things on the Internet.

“Imagine sitting in a rural health clinic, streaming three-dimensional medical imaging over the web, and discussing a unique condition with a specialist in New York,” the Google Fiber site says. “Or downloading a high-definition, full-length feature film in less than five minutes. Or collaborating with classmates around the world while watching live 3D video of a university lecture.”

Parks said he thinks Bellaire would be an attractive “test incubator” for the experimental network.

“We are small,” he said. “We have pretty much what they are looking for as far as home users, business users.”

Because the city of Bellaire is so small, he said, the city government isn’t tied up in red tape. Parks said it would be natural to work with Google because city leaders have good, one-on-one relationships with communications service providers like CenterPoint Energy, Comcast and AT&T.

Google Project Manager James Kelly wrote on the Google Blog this morning that the company plans to review all the applications and narrow down the choices for locations. Google employees will visit the top candidate cities and meet with local officials to learn more. The company hopes to choose sites for Google Fiber by the end of the year.

“This enthusiasm is much bigger than Google and our experimental network,” Kelly wrote. “If one message has come through loud and clear, it’s this: people across the country are hungry for better and faster Internet access.”