From Mayor McGinn's office:

The City of Seattle and Gigabit Squared signed an agreement in December for Gigabit Squared to provide high-speed internet to 12 demonstration neighborhoods in Seattle. As Mayor McGinn mentioned today, this has been increased to 14 demonstration neighborhoods, to include Ballard and West Seattle. In addition, Gigabit squared has secured the necessary funding to begin detailed engineering in these neighborhoods which they plan to complete over the next six weeks or so.

Below is an excerpt from the Mayor’s remarks:

“We're working hard to build out the next generation of our internet infrastructure and provide people with better choices. Last year Council approved our plan to leverage our unused "dark fiber" to companies who would use it to give people better internet services.

In December we announced an agreement with Gigabit Squared to begin building fiber to the home, with service levels up to 1 Gigabit per second in demonstration neighborhoods across Seattle. And I have some good news for people living on the west side of the city – Gigabit Squared has now added central Ballard and the West Seattle junction to their demonstration project, bringing us to a total of 14 neighborhoods to start.

Here's where things stand. More than 3300 people have signed up with an interest in using Gigabit Squared services, along with more than 130 businesses and numerous apartment buildings. If you want to help speed this along to your neighborhood - contact them!

Gigabit Squared has secured the funding they need to begin detailed engineering. By April they intend to have an updated business plan. That will include an estimate of how much it will cost to lay fiber to the first 14 neighborhoods, what the service tiers and their costs will be, more precise service boundaries, and when we can start to light this fiber up.

If their business plan succeeds as we hope it will, we can leverage our remaining fiber to bring better service to the entire city.”

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