In a lot of ways, Verizon's FiOS service has always been about showing off more than it's been about making money. Back in August Verizon proved that again when they created an experimental 1Gbps fiber network in Massachusetts. Now here we are again talking about Verizon's fiber trials. But as DSL Reports tells us, this time they've hit 10Gbps.

The test was done using a pre-release standard XG-PON2 system designed by Alcatel-Lucent. The endpoint of the network was seeing true 10Gb up and downstream connections. This is all well and good, but it's not hitting your street anytime soon. Verizon is still rolling out their 100Mb GPON-based FiOS. The XG-PON2 standard is far from complete as well. XG-PON1 isn't even ratified yet.

Still, it's nice to see this technology exists. It's comforting to know that someday when the rest of our PCs catch up, 10Gb internet may be waiting for us.

If you were to take a stroll along the Columbia river in Oregon. You might find the quaint city of Dalles. In Dalles, is a sizable Google data center. All that data needs some fat pipes to flow through, so The Big G installed dedicated fiber lines to the facility. The only problem is that the hanging fiber lines make tempting targets for bored hunters. For the last few years, Google has been plagued by outages caused by hunters opening fire at the lines each winter.

Whenever these lines are damaged, Google technicians have to make their way into the wilderness to repair them. Some of these locations can be remote, requiring a Caterpillar tractor, or even a helicopter to reach if the weather is poor. On one occasion, some lines were shot down during a snowstorm. The repair crew had to cross-country ski for three days to get to the damage and repair it. 

After realizing this was a losing battle, Google recently decided to build an underground channel for the fiber lines. Presumably, the hunter will leave the lines alone if the tantalizing fiber is hidden from their immediate view.

Google began accepting applications from towns and cities back in February to be part of their new high-speed fiber broadband initiative. While the winning municipalities won’t be announce until later this year, Google is looking to help everyone get some faster internet access. To these ends, the search giant is launching the Google Fiber for Communities site.

This isn’t going to be some sort of magical site to get that sweet, sweet Google fiber, but rather a site to help communities get there themselves. Google said in the blog post that they were inspired to do this after seeing the 1,100 community applications and 200,000 individual responses to their fiber initiative. It's nice, but we'd rather have Google do it for us.

The site offers information about federal legislation and zoning that affect fiber deployment. They also link to various organizations that could be of help. We would like to see better connection become common place. Could the Google Fiber for Communities site help us get there?