A little over a year ago, Google announced its intentions to build and test ultra-high-speed broadband networks in select cities across America.  Interested communities were asked to send their requests to Google for consideration.  Today, after hundreds of thousands of individual submissions detailing why their city was the best place to locate such a venture, Google announced a winner.  And that winner is…Kansas City, Kansas.

Huh?

Okay, I will refrain from knocking a city of 150,000 where I have never been.  I’m sure it is a lovely place, and they are well-deserving recipients (lucky jerks).  Come on, Topeka briefly changed its name to “Google, Kansas.” That wasn’t good enough?  But I digress.

Google’s high-speed network will be lightning fast, providing 1 gigabit per second fiber-to-the-home connections.  That’s nearly 100x faster than most American’s connections.  “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. Or downloading a high-definition, full-length feature film in less than five minutes. Or collaborating with classmates around the world while watching live 3-D video of a university lecture,” said Google in February of 2010.  Wait, go back to that 5 minutes HD movie download.  *Drool *

According to the official Google blog, here is why they chose Kansas City:

In selecting a city, our goal was to find a location where we could build efficiently, make an impact on the community and develop relationships with local government and community organizations. We’ve found this in Kansas City. We’ll be working closely with local organizations including the Kauffman Foundation, KCNext and the University of Kansas Medical Center to help develop the gigabit applications of the future.

The move is pending the city’s approval and Google plans to be up and running by 2012.  They also say they are looking at ways to bring this insanely fast internet to other cities.