“There’s so much happening in Austin, it was place we had been wanting to expand to, and especially with the cloud program in San Antonio we had a lot of visibility because of proximity,” said Jason Seats, the managing director of TechStars Austin. “It was always a matter of when and not if.”

Seats, who was the former managing director of TechStars cloud, is moving about 90 miles up I-35 to take over the Austin class of startups. He told me that TechStars will, “keep the cloud program basically as it is. I’ll be involved with it but we are working on filling the director role.”

The Austin program won’t have an explicit theme and joins programs in Boston, Boulder, Chicago, New York City, Seattle, Wash. and London. TechStars Austin will provide $18,000 in financing and the option of a $100,000 convertible debt, but the most valuable aspect for most will be mentoring from establish entrepreneurs and other program participants.

In an interview with me, Seats said he is looking for about 10 companies for the first class that will run from August 5 to Nov. 1. TechStars looks for founding teams with an idea who want to take that idea to the next level. Generally that means companies seeking outside financing, but as the head of a former boot-strapped startup (SliceHost, which sold to Rackspace) Seats is happy to bring those in as well.

As for connecting with the Austin entrepreneurial community, including the existing Capital Factory incubator, Seats has laid the groundwork. He notes the Capital Factory founders Joshua Baer and Bill Boebel are already TechStars Austin investors and mentors, and both Seats and Baer are planning to work together, despite both running accelerator programs. “The last thing we want to do is cleave the ecosystem,” Seats said.

Seats has also reached out to support from the venture community in Austin, notably Austin Ventures, but also to Silverton Partners and local angels. He expects to see a lot of enterprise software deals given that Austin has a track record of building and then selling or taking such companies public. That’s a plus from his perspective since he views enterprise software as “the first cousin of the cloud,”

“I’ve spent the last two weeks canvassing the city and meeting the CEOs and founders and operators and investors, and the depth of talent and expertise is excellent,” Seats told me. “I have one data point of experience building and running a company, but I’ve met with so many people in Austin who have run and sold their companies and are on their third or fourth of fifth thing.”

That experience, plus more visibility provided by TechStars, should only help Austin and its entrepreneurs get even more experience.

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In a blog post Wednesday evening, Time Warner said that existing customers with its standard cable package or above can log onto a city-wide Wi-Fi network the cable company is building out. Why now? Time Warner cites Google Fiber’s plans as a reason to kick its free Wi-Fi project into gear.

We’ve been rolling out our free WiFi network across our footprint for some time now, as part of our larger strategy to offer significantly more value to our Internet subscribers. Austin was in the game plan for 2013. But Google’s recent announcement encouraged us to deploy our network more aggressively now. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, we’re ready to compete.

While paying $70 for 30 Mbps internet service from Time Warner Cable and now getting free Wi-Fi around town is nice, if Google offers me a deal where I get a gigabit connection for anywhere near the Kansas City price tag of $70, free Wi-Fi isn’t going to stop me. It won’t even make me pause.

Still while, I wait to hear where Google will deploy fiber and how much it will cost, I’ll gladly check out the TWC Wi-Fi network. So far it’s only in a few locations, but the company plans to expand it around town. Customers can sign into the network, called TWC WiFi and use same username/password combo they use sign log into their account. Non subscribers can also pay $2.95 per hour for access. Subscribers also get access to other Wi-Fi networks in cities including New York City; Los Angeles; Chicago; Philadelphia; Atlanta; Baltimore; Boston; Washington, D.C.; San Francisco; Orlando; Kansas City; and Charlotte.

As far as responses to the threat of Google Fiber go, Time Warner’s is immediate and measured, especially when compared to AT&T’s. AT&T — with its fiber-to-the-node connections that currently top out at 24 Mbps — has a lot less than TWC has to offer when it comes to fending Google’s gigabit speeds. And after the 2009 experiment in broadband caps that Time Warner Cable attempted in Austin, it’s nice to have the city singled out for a benefit instead of a punitive pricing plan.

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Those reasons include an updated web site, attributes the city shares with Austin, such as universities, and the fact that Provo previously attempted to build a fiber to the home network as part of a public-private partnership called iProvo. The network experienced financial troubles and parts of it were later sold to Broadweave, a private company before ending up in the hands of Veracity Networks. Apparently, those network assets changed hands about a year ago and were purchased by the city. That means the city is working with Google to provide the underlying dark fiber.

The deal still awaits approval from the Provo City Council as well as more details from Google on the roll out, pricing and the deployment. Since Provo does have its own fiber network Google says it will provide its Free Internet service (5 Mbps speeds) to every home along the existing Provo network, for a $30 activation fee and no monthly charge for at least seven years. In Kansas City the service is provided for free with a $300 connection charge.

Google’s Kevin Lo says the first residents will get connected later this year.

Google’s announcement significant for a variety of reasons — not the least of which is that Google is planning to keep pushing its gigabit network to more places. It already is building a fiber to the home network in Kansas City, Kansas and Kansas City, Mo. But it also signifies the changing cost-benefit equation that municipalities and private companies are facing when it comes to fiber to the home networks.

More municipalities from North Carolina to Seattle are trying to entice gigabit networks to their areas using a combination of leasing existing city assets or tax breaks for newcomers. Companies like Google and Gigabit Squared are trying to take advantage of the willingness of city officials to deal and the underlying assets in those cities, but even companies like AT&T and Time Warner Cable are also starting to play ball.

The nature of network deployments are changing, and hopefully it will change the cost models to the point where more fiber to the home networks can become viable. However, it’s important to remember that private companies must act responsibly to their shareholders, while cities are accountable to their citizens. That’s a mix that might explode later on.

This story was updated at 2:28 PT to correct information about iProvo’s history.

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Ma Bell announced its gigabit plans on Tuesday after Google said it planned to offer its own fiber to the home, gigabit network to the Texas capital.

I got on the phone with Larry Solomon, an AT&T spokesman to get details on the network. Solomon said that AT&T will expand its existing fiber-to-the-node product to “homes and buildings.”

In its release AT&T also said that this expansion wouldn’t “materially affect its capital expenditures for 2013,” which struck me as far-fetched. However, Solomon said, “AT&T spends $20 billion a year on capital expenditures. We don’t expect this year to be materially different.”

In further conversation with Solomon the rationale behind that statement became clear. The time frame here is uncertain and AT&T has learned a thing or two from Google on how to lower the cost of deployment.

Google Fiber trucks stringing fiber in Kansas City.

AT&T has taken a lesson from Google Fiber

AT&T executives will meet with city and state officials seeking the same concessions that Google is getting in order to build out its network Solomon said. As someone who has followed telecom in Austin, and in Texas, this mostly means the ability to cherry pick where it will deploy its gigabit network. And that points to both the upside and downside of Google’s influence.

I wrote back in July that Google has changed the economics of deploying fiber in part by its strategy of getting people to sign up in advance and then choosing to deploy where demand was greatest. This eliminates the need to pass homes that might not sign up for fiber and also lets Google roll out service to neighborhoods in bulk.

Well, AT&T wants to do something similar. AT&T would like to follow a strategy where communities help drive demand for the gigabit service, Solomon said. When I asked if that means aggregating demand and then serving those communities he said that was something AT&T was interested in.

But there’s a big downside to this plan for the end user and the cities. Having both Google and AT&T trying to convince customers to sign up for their respective gigabit service effectively splits the vote. Solomon didn’t comment on that possibility, but did say AT&T wants to offer competitive pricing and build offers around wireless and other AT&T products. Google hasn’t announced pricing for its services in Austin yet, but in Kansas City a gigabit costs $70 a month and a gigabit plus TV costs $120 per month. I’ve covered AT&T’s comparable pricing in Austin here.

Conduit, anyone?

Two fiber networks may not be what we want — or even need.

Which brings me to my larger issue with our broadband strategy in the U.S. — the lack of a plan for delivering real wireline competition. If AT&T gets its way with city and state officials and goes head to head with Google in the neighborhoods, we’re looking at what could become — at best — a network buildout in areas where people own their own homes (Google had to develop special programs for attracting landlords to commit, which made Google Fiber in low-income areas a tougher sell) and already know they want a gigabit. At worst, neighbors who are split between Google or AT&T will not meet the threshold to get a buildout, and no one gets a gig.

And frankly, it’s dumb that both AT&T and Google might spent dollars building out fiber to the home in the same neighborhoods. Will streets get torn up twice? Will your broadband provider be determined for the life of your home based on the decisions that occur during a few pre-determined fiber sign-up periods?

A better option for Austin, and what could potentially become a model for communities everywhere, would be if Google and AT&T decide to work together to lay conduit (basically pipe in which anyone could run fiber) in areas where people want the service. When I asked Solomon about this possibility he said, “I wouldn’t rule out anything, but I wouldn’t include it either.”

However, he then pointed out that with its Android operating system, Google is not just a competitor on the fiber front, but also a partner. “Google provides the operating system for a lot of devices we sell, so in that sense Google is an indirect partner and great company. We have a lot respect for Google.”

Is the new gigabit future?

For better or worse AT&T is coming to Austin to seek the same opportunity that Google has. It wants to get city officials to let it roll out a fiber-to-the-home, gigabit network in a way that lowers AT&T’s deployment costs and allows it to put fiber exactly where people say they want it. And it is happy to take this plan on the road to other places in the U.S.

“We will sit down and work with any community that allows us to reach an agreement that allows us to accelerate our telecommunications investment,” Solomon said. “

As for timing on AT&T, Solomon says that once AT&T has its agreements from the city it plans a similar style of announcement to the one Google hosted in Austin today. “We have been looking at this for some time and seeing the Google announcement is obviously a sign that is encouraging,” Solomon said. “That telecom companies and Google or whomever can work with city officials to get policies in place to see regulations and costs lowered to speed up the infrastructure is good.”

I’m not so sure this is the best way for gigabit networks to be constructed. It is clearly less efficient than laying conduit — although in the U.S. the question of who would take on that investment has rested in the hands of private companies. There are very real questions and worries about how and when all parts of a community would be served. Google faced some of that scrutiny in Kansas City when lower-income neighborhoods weren’t signing up quickly enough, but eventually said that it would roll out fiber to 90 percent of eligible neighborhoods.

However, the telecom industry has needed innovation to get it to faster speeds, and this is clearly an innovative way to try to expand network access and upgrade the infrastructure. So instead of simply getting a gig, it looks like Austin may get a whole lot more. A starring role in the battle to bring innovation and faster speeds to the broadband industry. I just hope it’s one that consumers win.

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• Google and the City of Austin are hosting a shindig. Could Austin be getting a gigabit network?
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In the meantime, check out our stories on what this could mean for Austin and broadband development in general.

• The economics of Google Fiber and what it means for U.S. broadband
• Google Fiber is coming to 90% of eligible Kansas City neighborhoods
• As Austin readies for Google Fiber, here’s why you need a gig: even if you don’t think you do
• A quick look at Google Fiber pricing v. the incumbents
• The downsides of a gig: what other towns have learned after getting a gig

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But after the city and Google answer the questions about where they plan to expand, if they will employ the same tactics as it did in Kansas City and other key details, here are a few ways concerned citizens and business leaders can pry a little deeper under the surface. Getting a gig is great, but as Kansas City and other gigabit towns can tell you, there’s a big learning curve.

As Google even pointed out during its launch in Kansas City, equipment and event services such as SpeedTest.net weren’t ready to support gigabit connections. Now Ookla, which runs Speedtest.net, can support a gig, but devices like laptops that don’t support 802.11a/c standards might not. Mike Farmer, the CEO of Leap2, a Kansas City, Kan., startup that has a gig, says that his current MacBook is a bottleneck because, unless he hard-wires it, it can’t support a gig.

Is there anybody out there?

Mike Farmer of Leap2 praising the Google Fiber box.

The great thing about having a broadband connection is you are connected with billions of people around the world. But if you start building out gigabit-ready applications, or even applications that require 100 Mbps, you’re going to shrink your audience. The Fiber to the Home Council recently estimated that there are more than 640,000 North American households now receiving 100 Mbps service through a FTTH network. I’ve covered this before, but it bears repeating as Google plans to bring its gigabit service to Austin.

As Farmer says, “We have a car that goes 500 mph, but there’s only one road.” But Farmer and people in Chattanooga, Tenn. which is home to another gigabit network, have gotten together to discuss their plight and are planning to create a virtual co-working space using an always-on high-definition camera between their offices.

Farmer is part of a group of Kansas City startups renting a home in a residential area so they can play with Google Fiber. Venture capitalist Brad Feld bought a house in KC and set up an incubator program there too. However, the flip side of the entrepreneurial enthusiasm around Google Fiber is that others in town aren’t prepared for a gigabit connection.

How to handle the gigabit in civic institutions?

Aaron Deacon, managing director at the KC Digital Drive, told me that schools, for example, are trying to understand and find money for the gear they would need to support a gigabit. He explained that Google provides a gigabit drop to the school, so then the question of how to deploy that technology throughout the build or buildings is left up to the administrators. Do they just provide a computer lab where the termination point is and hope for the best, or do they invest in gigabit capable Wi-Fi access points?

These issues, from a lack of know-how to an inability to brainstorm applications, is the reason that U.S. Ignite was founded almost a year ago. the program aims to teach people what to do with a gigabit connection. The first lesson? It’s not just about speed. Jake Brewer, a spokesman with U.S. Ignite, says speed is only one aspect. Another is about giving neighborhoods the ability to control their broadband destiny.

What does a gigabit app even look like?

For example, the three things Ignite wants people thinking about is speed (upload and download), the local cloud and software-defined networking. Much like the deeply nerdy SDN stuff happening inside data centers, Brewer wants to add programmability and intelligence to the wide-area network. Advantages of this are many, from being able to easily reroute traffic on congested routes to being able to allocate network resources to a specific application to guarantee high-quality service.

As for that local cloud, it may be as simple as storing data closer to the end users or as complicated as creating a town that can harness its compute to double as a data center. For a list of awesome gigabit applications that Brewer and Ignite have helped devise, check out their post from last week.

And there’s the “downside” of getting a gig. Once you have it, the real work begins.

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Even if my earlier arguments about innovation don’t convince you that Google Fiber could help change the broadband landscape, then here’s a chart that could help. For the practical people out there, just check out the pricing of Google Fiber today versus the pricing of the incumbent ISPs in Austin.

How much broadband costs in Austin.

Comparing pricing across telecommunications services is tough, so I assembled the highest speed internet package, the TV package that offered digital cable but none of the extra premium channels and a DVR package that provided whole home DVR as Google TV does. Time Warner Cable has a box and modem fee associated with its service. Google TV doesn’t have an equipment fee but it does have a different channel line up than the incumbents.

Looking at this, Google Fiber would be more expensive than AT&T’s services until people started using more devices and requiring more capacity. However, AT&T has a cap of 250 GB per month, and despite what the salesman told me over the phone, I’m pretty sure that I do need a 24 Mbps connection today to satisfy my family members. Still, on the eve of the Google Fiber announcement I’m tempted to switch over to AT&T while I wait for the build out.

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I felt like kid the night before Christmas, running over all the possibilities in my head and generally waking my husband up every few minutes to exclaim ridiculous things like, “This means our bandwidth won’t fluctuate when we’re watching Hulu at night!” or “I bet we could build some kind of video related IM, so I could be in the kitchen and ping you at work. It would just be always on! Hell, it might be streamed at the new higher than high-def, 4K standard or better if we’re doing gigabit service. OMG 4K!”

It’s no longer a question: Google is bringing its Google Fiber network to Austin. I’ve confirmed it with sources and the brief publication of a post in the middle of the night by Google should assuage anyone else’s doubts. While I have no idea how far Google plans to extend its network, if it plans to model the roll out on Kansas City’s build out I just have to get my neighbors as excited about a gigabit as I am.

LGs 4K TV. Try to get that past your bandwidth cap.

My husband’s willingness to humor my gigabit suggestions became less enthusiastic after midnight, but he pointed out what many people are no doubt thinking, “We won’t have to deal with Time Warner Cable anymore.” As a customer of Time Warner’s business service, he has had several bitter experiences. On the residential side I’ve been miffed by the price hikes (I’m paying $70 for 30/5 service) but content with the service. But as I sit here writing this post while streaming music via my Sonos and while my child watches Netflix, I’m well aware that even if the executives at Time Warner Cable may say that consumers don’t want a gig, I do.

And you should too. Heck, in Kansas City I’d pay the same price for a gig as I do now for something 30 times slower.

Broadband is making your life more fun. And better.

Broadband has undoubtedly made our lives better in countless small and large ways. Every time someone sends you a goofy YouTube video or animated GIF you’re taking advantage of the ever-increasing speeds ISPs have delivered. When I started accessing the web via dial-up modem, an animated GIF stopped a web page for loading for minutes. Yet, we waited!

Now people pop nine of them in a news article as a means of telling the story. Favoring visuals instead of text on web sites is a superficial change, but it’s part of an evolution to real-time video connections and maybe even ambient presence. It’s like Skype on steroids.

But there are more serious benefits. For example, a few years ago when my daughter broke her leg I wrote how awesome it was that the doctors in the ER could just email her X-rays to the pediatric orthopedist on call.

The on-call doc got to stay home and we managed to get answers faster and get my daughter back home. X-rays are big files, and we’re lucky the doctor had the ability to receive them. He’s lucky he didn’t have a data cap that would prevent him from — or charge him extra — for getting multigigabyte files.

And that’s one of the biggest repercussions of Google’s fiber roll outs. The more people who can pay $70 for gigabit service (or get 5 Mbps for free), the more pressure this puts on the existing providers to upgrade their networks and cut anticonsumer crap like data caps. But that’s exactly why more cities need these networks.

You don’t need a gig today, but you need one for tomorrow

You may be wondering why you, in particular, need a gig. The answer is that today you don’t.

I spend all day thinking and writing about broadband and even I have no idea what I would do with a symmetrical gigabit network inside my home. But we’ve gone far beyond the idea that the internet is just a fad. It’s the underpinning of the information economy. Right now our content is digital, and while next generation video standards like 4K will require 25 Mbps connections, the real reason you need a gig isn’t about video.

The internet today transfers digital bits, but it’s rapidly moving to the place where it will transfer physical atoms. Thus, it won’t be about information, but about physical goods. Things like Uber or same-day delivery are examples of this. You tell the internet what you want and it delivers it for you in real-time or at least that day. If you consider 3D printers and the evolution of on-demand manufacturing then the internet could bring you physical goods directly. You want a bracelet you see online? If you have a 3D printer, the company will send the file to your Makerbot and it will print it.

This stool may be the future of on-demand, custom manufacturing.

More likely, the company would ship the design as a file to a manufacturing partner near your home and they would print it. Then they deliver it to you or you pick it up. Take this outside the consumer realm to manufacturing and maybe you get a car part in a few hours as opposed to waiting a few days for it to ship. In medicine, better and faster connectivity opens up the possibility of custom, on-demand drugs. There are startups today offering biological research services via the web. It’s not so far-fetched to imagine your pharmacy stocking the raw materials and then getting a custom drug recipe from your doctor via the web, and having it manufactured on the spot.

Let’s say goodbye to the information age and embrace what’s next.

This is the future, or some variation of the future. The point is we don’t know exactly what we will need, but it will need connectivity. And while we have physical resource constraints, legal barriers and a lack of knowledge about how to pull this future together, we shouldn’t have to worry about our connectivity. For us to move beyond the information age we need to be able to take out ability to transfer information reliability and at low cost for granted. Fiber networks offering a gigabit allow us to take data caps, congested networks and service providers that don’t want to lose their triple play revenue out of the equation.

Only then does the information age become something that’s a given. Something that’s so much a part of our fabric that we can move on to the next level of innovation. And that is why we need a gig even if we don’t know what we’re going to do with it.

We need it so we can innovate. So we can move beyond animated GIFs and into the next wave of interactive story telling. So we can take the ability to ship medical records to the best doctor, no matter where she is located, for granted and start working on custom cures that will help that patient.

With Google Fiber, Austin will get that chance. Every single person who gets the opportunity to sign up should. They should stay up late talking to their spouses what they want to do with unlimited connectivity. The information age was awesome, but now it’s time to see what’s next.

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The City of Austin and Google are hosting an event next Tuesday on April 9, and sources in the city suspect it is related to a broadband announcement. As a resident whether or not we are getting Google Fiber is my first and most pressing question, but if this is a gigabit announcement, it has big ramifications beyond my personal broadband speeds.

The invitation reads:

You are a leader here in Austin. Every day, your work and contributions help make our community better and stronger. That’s why we want you to be one of the first to hear about something new coming to Austin. Please join Google and the City of Austin for an announcement on Tuesday.

It’s possible that Google’s invite is nothing more than an invitation to business leaders to hear about a new office or a pilot program for a Google service such as same-day delivery. However, Google has said that it is thinking about deploying other gigabit networks outside of the one it is turning on in Kansas City. And Austin was pretty high up in the running with regards to the initial competition between cities to get Google’s fiber network. With a tech savvy population, a city-owned utility that might be able to offer concessions when it comes to stringing fiber along telephone poles and business and a government willing to work with Google, Austin has many of the elements that might draw Google.

Google declined to comment for this story.

At the launch of Google Fiber last summer in Kansas City, Google’s Milo Medin was clear in his frustration with how access speeds and costs were not keeping up with computing speeds and costs. As the man who helped build the first cable broadband business back when everyone said DSL speeds would suffice, he’s well aware that if you give people faster speeds they will use them. And that’s the stated rationale for Google to get into the broadband business — it wants to see what people will do with a gigabit connection.

But if Google really wants to put pressure on incumbents, perhaps rolling out fiber in one place isn’t enough?

Equipment, communities and even developers aren’t ready to support gigabit speeds yet, but as more places get them, companies will develop products and services that can handle those with gigabit connections. Maybe Google is ready to invest more dollars into broadband networks to drive demand. After all it can’t see what people will do with a gig if people can’t actually find ways to use it — and if people don’t have other gigabit communities to share their gigabit applications with.

So I’m hoping that the Google announcement next Tuesday in Austin is about a gigabit network for the Texas capital. Any expansion of Google’s network is a benefit not just to the cities that get it, but it also places pressure on incumbents to invest in upgrading their own networks. Maybe we can get to gigabit networks in all 50 states. Or even better — gigabit networks in every area where the population densities let the economics make sense.

Updated at 4:21 pm: Austin’s ABC affiliate KVUE is reporting that it has confirmed Google Fiber is coming to Austin.

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