At a press conference yesterday, Google announced that it was expanding its 1Gbps fiber-to-the-home testbed network. No longer limited to the citizens of Kansas City, Kansas, the company now plans to include Kansas City, Missouri—the 450,000-person city directly across the Kansas and Missouri River confluence that divides the states.

Kansas City, Missouri mayor Sly James was certainly pleased, and was on hand to make a shockingly hyperbolic statement: "As a result of this announcement, we have become the most attractive city on the planet to entrepreneurs."

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Kansas City, Kansas, will be the first city to receive Google's experimental high-speed Internet network. The announcement Wednesday ends a year-long process that sparked a heated nationwide competition between more than 1,000 U.S. communities.

The search giant first announced its intention to build an experimental fiber network with speeds 100 times faster than the typical U.S. Internet connection — an astounding 1 GB per second. Google's goal wasn't to become an Internet service provider (ISP) that would compete with the likes of Comcast but rather was to help push broadband and Internet delivery forward.

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Google has chosen Kansas City, Kansas for its 1 Gigabit fiber-to-the-home network it announced last February, disappointing the hundreds of other towns that sent in applications in the hopes of getting their own Google-funded superfast network. Just last week, I wondered if Google was merely saber-rattling with its fiber plans after it delayed the announcement late last year, and I'm thrilled to be proven wrong.

From Google's blog post on the topic:

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