With the six-week registration period for Google's super-fast `1 gigabit per second' broadband in Kansas City having come to a close this past Sunday, Google has recently announced that the first Kansas City neighborhoods to be connected to the new fiber-optic network will be picked on Thursday.

While the recent Google announcement reveals that Google Fiber is coming to Kansas City, the company had earlier disclosed that 180 of 202 neighborhoods in the Kansas City area had registered and qualified for the deployment of the new fiber-optic network.

The announcement, about the forthcoming initiation of the fastest citywide Internet service in the US, brings Google a step closer to roll out its so-called gigabit broadband - underscoring the Google Fiber project - which will provide one-hundred times faster online speeds than the average US Internet connections, as well as television programming.

Noting that the Google Fiber effort in Kansas City marks a new phase for Google, and that the program will be run as a for-profit business, Kevin Lo - Google's general manager in charge of the project - said that Google Fiber is not an experiment like the company's free Wi-Fi service in its Mountain View hometown, or the high-speed fiber project at Stanford University.

At the Google's Fiber Space, a converted mini-mall on the Kansas-Missouri border, Lo said last week that Google Fiber is "real business", with Google's key objective being "successful" delivery of "1-gigabit Internet and TV in Kansas City."