Google is planning to deploy its own experimental fiber-optic network to at least 50,000 homes to deliver speeds of 1 gigabit-per-second, which is more than 20 times faster than residential fiber optic services offered today in the U.S.

The City Council of Dalles, a small town in Oregon, voted Monday to accept a $100,000 grant from Google to build, operate and maintain a wi-fi cloud in the downtown business district. The grant money would be used to purchase and install the equipment and maintain it for three years.

With connecting its data centers, speeding up search, and lowering the cost for streaming billions of videos a month on YouTube, Google is taking its first step in connecting that fiber backbone to consumer’s homes.

This kind of effort makes sense, as Google seeks to offer a whole new generation of applications that would be available in the cloud. [Free WiFi: Google, The Cloud and the Significance of a Small Oregon Town]

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Tags | broadband, cloud, google, internet, network, oregon, wi-fi