Morgantown’s "We Want a Gig" campaign was publicly endorsed by West Virginia University last week and more recently by City Council members.
The campaign hopes Morgantown will be selected as a test market for Google’s Internet network, which would provide internet connections more than 100 times faster than most of the country, at a competitive rate.
"WVU is very much part of the community," said Mridul Gautam, interim associate vice president for Research and Economic Development.
He said the University has been working with the city for two weeks now to help prepare the campaign and believes Morgantown has set itself apart from other cities with recent economic growth as well as infrastructure that would provide Google with a "superb" test location.
Gautam mentioned Morgantown’s rugged terrain as a perennial barrier to communication and that a fiber network like Google’s could allow access to high-speed Internet where it was not available previously.
Morgantown Mayor Bill Byrne believes this is one of the major benefits of the network.
"It would enhance the ability to deliver content to rural schools," Byrne said.
He said these schools have already expressed concerns that they are not able to deliver the kind of electronic content they would like to, due to current bandwidth restrictions.
The network could also help deliver health care to rural areas of the state.
This, along with $126 million the state received from the federal government for infrastructure upgrades, would change the lives of West Virginians, he said, particularly in rural areas.
Gautam seconded this notion, explaining how real-time video conferencing could help relieve the necessity for in-person monitoring, which is difficult to obtain for many West Virginia residents.
He also believes Morgantown benefits from being a seat of local government, close to the offices of many federal agencies, the home of one of the world’s largest manufacturer of pharmaceuticals and a public land grant research university.
To emphasize the city’s commitment to Google, Byrne guaranteed in the city’s proposal to Google that the county would raise money to provide computers to any county students who do not currently have a computer in their home.
Close to 15 percent of the county’s students do not have computers in their homes, according to Byrne.
He said the county would work with the Board of Education to determine who needs the computers and would then purchase them for these homes.
WVU already has an on-campus fiber network, but the Google network would provide an upgrade to the system with an increase in bandwidth.
Gautam hopes the new technology could help change not only outsiders perception of the state but how we view ourselves.
"I want to help transform us from not just coal miners but data miners," Gautam said.
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