Louisville, Irvine and San Diego next up for Google Fiber

Google announced Thursday that its Fiber high-speed internet service is once again looking to expand.

The Google Fiber team says it is working city officials in Louisville, Kentucky, Irvine, California and San Diego to study various factors that could affect construction of the network, such as local topography, housing density, and the condition of existing infrastructure.

The cities, meanwhile, must also complete a checklist of items -- like providing a map of utility lines, for example -- to further prepare for the large-scale build.

"We've seen that this planning process is helpful, both for Google Fiber and city officials--working together, we can take a massive infrastructure project and break it into manageable pieces," Jill Szuchmacher, director of Google Fiber expansion, wrote in a blog post.

Szuchmacher reiterated the fact that there's no guarantee that the aforementioned cities will actually get the high-speed internet cables until the planning phase is complete.

Last month San Antonio, Texas was added to the roster of Google Fiber cities, marking the biggest Google Fiber target city to date. An estimated 4,000 miles of fiber-optic cables will be planted across the city's metro area once installation is complete.

Prior to the San Antonio deployment Google Fiber announced an initiative to bring free internet access to public housing residents as part of the ConnectHome program launched by the White House and US Department of Housing and Urban Development. Google intends to install free high-speed broadband in urban communities in Atlanta, Durham, Nashville and Kansas City as part of the pledge.

Google Fiber is already up and running in three cities -- Austin, Kansas City and Provo -- with expansion plans previously lined up for Salt Lake City, Nashville, Atlanta, Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham.