Google plans to build and test super fast fiber-optic broadband networks in a few communities around the U.S., promising up to a one gigabit per second service - a hundred-fold increase over what most Americans currently can subscribe to.
A 1 Gbps could let a user download a HD movie in minutes and is more than 1000 times faster than AT&T's basic DSL offering. But why Google would want to undertake such a major project in the first place is not exactly clear yet. It's doubtful that Google would want to deliver broadband service to every home in the United States. So what is the search giant up to this time? Is Google's goal to influence national broadband policies? Maybe Google wants to show that traditional ISPs are deploying broadband ineffectively. It's hard to know for sure what Google's up to, but Google is doing at least three things here:

1) It's demonstrating to the public and to regulators that really fast broadband isn't nearly as hard as companies like AT&T and Verizon pretend it is.
2) It's sending a warning to large telecoms that they better start working to reduce prices and increase service or they might face a competitor they dont' want to go up against, and
3) By partnering with municpalities, it's learning/showing the nation how to bypass the current dominant telecom players by creating municipally-owned fiber infrastructure that can be rented to multiple service providers, who can then duke it out on price and service. If successful, that could create a model where Google uses its huge cash surplus to finance municipally-owned fiber optic networks, undermining its telecom rivals and speeding up the nation's internet without ever having to run a consumer-grade network or learn how to do customer support.