Google has set a March 26 deadline for city governments to express interest, and the company plans to announce winners before 2011.
The Juneau Economic Development Council handled the city's application, and its meetings generated excitement about the possibility that Juneau - though a longshot- could be picked.
Jeremy Hansen, an information technology specialist working on the application, says Juneau has a chance because Google is looking for a challenge and the city presents a unique technical problem, given the mountains, the water and its distance from the Lower 48.
Google's networks would deliver data at 1 gigabit per second - roughly 50 to 300 times faster than the DSL, cable and fiber-optic networks that now connect most U.S. homes to the Internet.
We were just talking about this stuff Sunday. We received a phone call from a naval ship off of the Brazilian coast and later in the day another from a friend on a sailboat in the Mediterranean. We traded text messages with a daughter in Hawaii and read the highlights of a newspaper in Iowa along with the FDNM here in town on the computer. That was quite a bit but we are just the average US household.
When I moved up here in 1974 our TV news was all canned and arrived the following day if you were lucky. The Thanksgiving specials on TV were shown before Christmas if you were lucky.