Hey Google, where's the fiber?

Just in time for the weekend, GigaOm has delivered up a situation that's ripe for pondering: "It's been almost 14 months since Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) announced its plans to wire up an entire community with a fiber-to-the-home network that would be capable of gigabit speeds ... and there's nary a fiber to be seen."

Google, of course, has been somewhat busy of late with contentious issues, like its alleged spying via its Street View service and its on again-off again effort to establish Google TV. It's also been busy indoctrinating new project leader Milo Medin (misidentified in the item as Milo Medlin), a name well known to the cable industry from his time with Excite@Home, who came aboard in December.

Still, the lack of action on such a hot issue led GigaOm's Stacey Higginbotham to wonder "if instead of wiring up a municipality, Google may have used its contest to win a fiber network as a threat to bring ISPs around to its way of thinking on issues such as network neutrality and tiered broadband."

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