There’s no place like home — especially if you live Kansas City, Kansas, where houses will soon be connected to the net via fiber optic cables that Google promises will deliver 1 gigabit per second internet connections — roughly a hundred times faster than a typical 10 Mbps cable connection.

With that fast a connection, it becomes possible to download a full-length feature film from iTunes in seconds.

More than 1,100 cities and town across the country applied to be the testbed, highlighting the dismal state of broadband connections around the country. The Tuesday announcement came after more than a year of deliberations and a change of leadership in the project.

Google says it will start putting in the fiber with help from vendors and the utility company this year. Service will start for the first customers early next year and the price will be competitive with what people pay now for an exponentially slower connection.

The long-delayed announcement comes as AT&T, the nations’ largest DSL provider, announced that it would begin metering its customers’ internet usage and charging overage fees. Even stricter limitations are in effect in Canada, prompting Netflix to offer its Canadian users the option to choose lower bit rate speeds than their connection can handle in order to reduce how much data they use a month.

While internet usage is often compared to other utilities, it has one significant difference — transferring data into and out of the net’s backbone is cheap. For instance, Time Warner Cable spends less than 3 percent of the revenue from its cable ISP service on data connections, and that percentage is falling even as customers use more data.

The problem ISPs are facing is, however, capital-intensive. Laying fatter pipes, including fiber optic cables, is not cheap, and ISPs want to slow the pace at which they need to re-invest profits into building out their infrastructure.

Google’s project is likely intended to spur investment by ISPs, since for Google, the equation is simple. The faster the internet connection, the more people use its search engine and click on its ads.

As for those communities that didn’t win, municipal broadband advocates have an answer: build it yourselves. Sadly, however, that strategy often leads to lawsuits and lobbying by the telecom incumbents.

Google has said that it will allow ISPs to offer service using the fiber it lays, an arrangement known as open access that’s designed to create competition and better service.

Photo: Grabbing fiber optic cables. Kainet