A sign is posted outside of the Google headquarters January in January 2010 in California. Google announced plans on Thursday to test an ultra high-speed broadband network at Stanford University, where the Internet giant's co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin went to school.

Google announced plans on Thursday to test an ultra high-speed broadband network at Stanford University, where the Internet giant's co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin went to school.

Google said it will provide Internet speeds of up to one gigabit per second -- 100 times faster than today's average connections -- to around 850 faculty- and staff-owned homes on Stanford's Palo Alto, California, campus.

The Mountain View, California-based said that it will begin breaking ground on the project, which will use fiber optic technology, in early 2011.

Earlier this year, Google announced plans to provide one-gigabit-per-second fiber-to-the-home networks in "one or more trial locations" in the United States serving at least 50,000 people and potentially as many as 500,000.

Google project manager James Kelly said in a blog post that the Stanford trial "will be a key step towards that goal."

"We'll be able to take what we learn from this small deployment to help scale our project more effectively and efficiently to much larger communities," Kelly said.

Communities across the United States have been vying to be selected for the Google Fiber project and a city in Kansas even went so far as to temporarily rename itself "Google" in a bid to impress the Internet titan.

Kelly said Google plans to announce the winning community for the Google Fiber project by the end of the year.

(c) 2010 AFP