Duluth and its more than 1,000 competitors for super high-speed Internet access promised by Google will have to wait a little longer to see who wins.
In a message posted Wednesday on Google's website, Milo Medin, vice president for access services, said interest far exceeded the company's expectations and that has made it harder to make a decision.
"We had planned to announce our selected community or communities by the end of this year," Medin posted, "but the level of interest was incredible -- nearly 1,100 communities across the country responded to our announcement -- and exceeded our expectations.
"While we're moving ahead full steam on this project, we're not quite ready to make that announcement."
Medin said they are not reopening the selection process. He said they expect to make an announcement in early 2011.
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Chris Swanson, CEO of Pure Driven LLC, a marketing firm retained by Duluth to help with its Google bid, said the timeline for the decision remains unclear.
"They say they'll announce sometime in early 2011. But we don't know if that means January, sometime during the first quarter of the year or by June 1," he said.
Duluth promoters say they are in the top tier of communities in the running for Google's experiment. The company announced early in 2010 that it wanted to provide an entire community with broadband access 100 times faster than what most people have access to today.
Medin joined Google this week as vice president of Access Services. He said the Google Fiber team has been experimenting with new fiber deployment technologies on Google's campus and will install a "beta" network to 850 homes around Stanford University in California.
