The City of Bloomington will be hosting a public meeting to receive input from the community for compelling, creative and outside the box uses for an experimental broadband network being proposed by Google.

According to Google’s Web site, the company “plan[s] to test ultra-high speed broadband networks in one or more trial locations across the country. Our networks will deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today, over 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections.”

The City of Bloomington will have until March 26 to submit a Request for Information (RFI) to Google conveying interest in participating in the experiment.

Anyone interested in the project is encouraged to attend the meeting, which will be held Thursday, March 4, from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. in the City Council Chambers, 401 N. Morton Street.

“The key to a successful application will be the ability of a community to achieve meaningful use of the network,” said Rick Dietz, City Information & Technology Services Director. “We need to describe compelling high bandwidth applications and creative new ideas that will appeal to the geeky side of Google. This is why we are asking for ideas from the public; good ideas come from active involvement from all stakeholders.”

For more information visit http://www.google.com/appserve/fiberrfi or e-mail Dietz at dietzr@bloomington.in.gov.