Islander Alex Huppenthal has been working hard to garner community support for bringing ultra high-speed internet access to San Juan County through Google’s new gigabit internet experiment. In his view, it would be “a quantum leap” from the current available access. His Facebook group, “Bring Google Gigabit Internet to the San Juan Islands,” has 212 supporters to date. He is encouraging community members to visit the site and to fill out a brief survey.

Google is planning to build and test ultra-high speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the country, delivering internet speeds 100 times faster than the average connection with 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections. If the community presents enough compelling interest and evidence of need to Google, “We might just be able to move the islands to state-of-the-art broadband,” said Huppenthal. There will be a meeting at noon at Enzo’s on Wednesday, March 24, and Google’s deadline for submissions is March 26. For more info, visit google.com