What ultra-fast Internet would mean for Kansas City businesses

Google is in the process of laying fibers to bring ultra-fast Internet to Kansas City.

Kansas City homes will be the beneficiaries of the new high-speed Internet network that is 100-times faster than the internet speed an average American uses.

But the city's business community also sees the benefits that nibble data could create for the city.

It's not clear if Kansas City businesses will get to tap into the network, but it's not keeping businesses from imagining the possibilities of the fiber network, IT World reports:

[T]he mere presence of Google's fiber network in their neighborhood has inspired Kansas City businesses to dream of what a 1Gbps fiber connection could mean for them. Think Big Partners, a Kansas City-based firm that describes itself as "an early-stage business incubator, startup accelerator and mentorship-based collaborative network," recently concluded its Gigabit Challenge contest that encouraged Kansas City businesses to come up with innovative ways to use the Google Fiber network to "help establish an ecosystem that will cause innovation and disruptive technologies to surge."

SEIN Analytics and Asset Management, which won the grand prize at the Gigabit Challenge, is a financial technology startup that is in the process of building a large database that tracks the performance of structured financial securities. Samuel Belu-John, the founder and developer of SEIN, says that the broadband technologies available right now allow the company to monitor 350 different kinds of public financial transactions. But since there are roughly 14,000 types of public financial transactions overall, SEIN will obviously need a much faster connection if it wants to significantly expand its overall database.

"As we expand you can see our database expanding very rapidly," he says. "You can imagine that the amount of data we are drawing down is quite large. ... What this high-speed network allows is for an entrepreneur to build something with a large amount of cloud data without putting up $1 million to $2 million to build out their own infrastructure."

Connecting businesses to the fiber network would allow tech startups to dream big while saving them money. It could also make Kansas City a hot destination for entrepreneurs and tech startups.

But that day likely won't come soon. Construction on the residential portion of the experimental network started last month, and the network likely wouldn't come until after that phase is complete. But keep your eyes on Kansas City as an extremely affordable alternative to Silicon Valley if businesses can get wired into the network.

Kansas City businesses dream big with Google Fiber, despite uncertain availability [IT World]

Photo: Brian Hillegas/Flickr

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com