When Will GFiber Be Available in Your City?

Upcoming GFiber cities

Many of the areas where GFiber is expanding are near existing GFiber cities. For example, GFiber has been slowly expanding in Salt Lake City, Utah, for several years. Now it’s extending its network into many of the neighboring cities in the Salt Lake Valley.

Although the list of currently announced new cities is still relatively short, GFiber is also expanding its network within current GFiber cities. For example, in early 2021, GFiber expanded into four more neighborhoods in Austin, Texas: Allandale, North Loop, Mueller, and North Shoal Creek. As it expands its network in Austin, GFiber plans to add more neighborhoods in the near future.⁶

Google has also expanded into several new neighborhoods in the Raleigh-Durham area, with new coverage areas in the cities of Chapel Hill and Carrboro.⁷ If you live in or near an existing GFiber city, your odds are better than most for getting GFiber in your neighborhood.

Current GFiber cities

GFiber began with a single city in 2010 and quickly expanded to a handful of cities across the country. At the time of its announcement, 1 Gbps (1,000 Mbps) was about 100 times faster than the average residential internet speed.⁸ And it wasn’t targeted at huge tech hubs like Silicon Valley and Seattle, but at suburban cities like Kansas City, Missouri, and Provo, Utah.

The massive hype surrounding these early GFiber cities not only pushed other cities to compete for Google’s attention but also made customers start demanding more from their internet service providers (ISPs). Over the next few years, fiber-optic connections went from being almost unheard-of in residential internet to being the gold standard of internet connections against which all other connection types are judged.

Google hits pause

Despite the popularity of GFiber and the overwhelming number of cities lining up to become the next fiber city (Google expected between 10 and 50 applications and ended up with over 1,000), the project was put on hold a few years later.⁸

In Louisville, Kentucky, AT&T filed lawsuits against the local city and county governments to prevent GFiber from using utility poles, thus slowing down the network’s deployment. These lawsuits halted GFiber’s expansion and kept eager potential customers waiting for years for fiber to get to their neighborhood. Although a judge later dismissed the lawsuits as frivolous, the project was severely derailed.⁹

During this time, GFiber experimented with ”microtrenching,” an installation method where, instead of digging a deep, foot-wide trench, a crew could simply carve a narrow groove into a road, only slightly wider than the cable and a few inches deep.

Unfortunately, the experiment in Louisville went poorly, and many fiber-optic cables became damaged or even popped out of the road, tripping pedestrians.¹⁰ Google had to pay to repair the roads damaged during the failed installation and eventually pulled out of Louisville altogether.

At this point, the company had announced that GFiber was pausing all fiber-optic projects. Not only were potential expansions into new cities canceled, but mentions of network expansion in existing GFiber cities also disappeared from the provider’s website.¹¹ For a time, this looked like the end of GFiber.

GFiber today

After a long silence, GFiber announced its first new city in four years: West Des Moines, Iowa.¹² Shortly after that, it announced several new cities around Salt Lake City, Utah.^{2, 3, 4, 5} Although this expansion is not quite as aggressive as its initial campaign, it seems likely that GFiber will continue to expand into new areas.

Despite the numerous setbacks that it encountered in places like Louisville, GFiber is continuing to explore new and innovative ways of delivering fiber-to-the-home technology. For example, despite its previous failure with microtrenching, GFiber is once again using this technique in places like Taylorsville, Utah.³

GFiber is also engaging in more public-private partnerships in order to expand its fiber network. It previously made similar deals with cities like Provo, Utah, which sold its municipal fiber infrastructure to Google.¹³ In West Des Moines, the city is building an “open conduit” that can be leased out to providers like GFiber.¹⁴ Many other countries handle internet infrastructure like this, and it can help increase competition among ISPs while reducing costs to customers.

Merger with Astound

On March 11, 2026, GFiber and Astound announced that they would be merging to form a new company, which, as of time of writing, still has no official name.⁴¹ The new company will be majority owned by Stonepeak, the parent company of Astound, but will be led by the current GFiber executive team. The goal of this merger is to combine GFiber’s innovation and high growth with Astound’s existing infrastructure to create a nationwide provider.

We don’t yet know how this merger will shape the future of GFiber, but with its current executive team taking the reins of the new company, we’re hopeful that they continue down the path they’ve blazed thus far.

How to get GFiber in your area

GFiber is still a relatively small ISP compared to companies like AT&T and Xfinity, so if it’s not in your city yet, you probably have a long wait ahead of you. In the meantime, there are some things that you can do to encourage GFiber and other fiber providers to expand into your area.

The most direct thing you can do is encourage change on a local level. Go to town council meetings. Talk to your state representatives. When state and local governments invest in municipal internet infrastructure and open networks, it can lower the barrier for smaller ISPs like GFiber to enter the area, improving speeds and increasing competition. Similar initiatives have been announced in places like New York City in order to bring universal broadband to all its residents.¹⁵

If nothing else, demand more from your internet. When GFiber was first announced, no one thought residential customers would want gigabit internet speeds. Now, demand for video chat, streaming services, and other media have made slower connections almost obsolete. If there’s enough demand for high-speed internet, some company will try to get it to you.

GFiber Webpass

GFiber Webpass (formerly known as Google Webpass) is a service that provides fixed wireless internet for high-occupancy buildings, such as apartments and office buildings. Unlike most providers, GFiber Webpass doesn’t offer service to individual households, but rather to landlords, who then wire the whole building and give tenants the option to use the built-in internet service.

Somewhat confusingly, GFiber Webpass is not a fiber connection, and it is not available in GFiber Cities. The name is simply for branding purposes—the two services are completely distinct.

Most widely available fiber providers

If GFiber isn’t available in your area yet, there might be another provider in your area offering fiber internet plans. Many nationwide ISPs are rolling out fiber-to-the-home connections to meet customer demands, and many of them have a much bigger fiber network than GFiber. The big difference is that none of these providers have a 100% fiber network like GFiber, so just because a provider covers your area, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they offer fiber at your address.

Disclaimers