Official Blog
The latest news from the Fiber team
Helping our communities connect in a time of isolation
Friday, April 17, 2020
We’re all getting used to our quarantine world — working from home, teaching our kids, wearing masks — a lot has changed in the last month, and it looks like it’s going to be awhile before we return to our regularly scheduled lives.
Finding ways to connect with our families, coworkers, classmates, and friends from a distance has become essential for most of us. Google Fiber is grateful to get to be a part of facilitating that connection for our customers, and we take that responsibility very seriously. We wanted to share how we’re dealing with the COVID-19 crisis as we continue to bring high-speed, high-bandwidth internet to our customers and to our communities to keep even more people connected.
Serving our customers
Internet connections have become the foundation on which we build all our other connections, from work and studies to information and entertainment. A reliable Internet connection with the speed and capacity to meet our ever-growing needs is no longer something that’s just nice to have — it’s a necessity.
That’s why Google Fiber is continuing construction, installations and network maintenance. While most of our team members are working from home, we've made numerous process and equipment changes to protect the health and safety of our field teams, whose jobs require them to be out in the community, connecting customers or maintaining our network.
These include, but are not limited to:
Personal protective equipment for our field teams
Regular handwashing and sanitizing
Following social distancing practices
Restrictions on certain types of construction methods
In addition to these enhanced safety measures to protect our customers and crews, we’re coordinating with local governments and engaging communities within each city we serve to make sure we're charting the right local approach
For the most up-to-date information on our health and safety precautions, please visit
our help center
. And although our retail Fiber Spaces are closed, we are standing by 24/7 to help with anything you need to make your internet work for you, so please
reach out to our team
if you need anything.
(((anchor)))
Serving our communities
Advancing digital inclusion is a central tenet of Google Fiber. In each of our communities, we partner with local organizations doing great work to help build digital literacy and increase internet access for residents.
Over the past two years, Google Fiber has supported nearly 1 million digital literacy training hours, helped provide more than 10,000 free or affordable devices to residents in need, connected 275,000 people to STEM programs, and empowered 7,000 aspiring entrepreneurs with training programs. In fact, in the last two years, our partner organizations were able to reach over 1.3 million unique participants across the country.
But there is much more work to be done. COVID-19 has sharpened that need, drawing clear lines between the digital haves and have-nots. Google Fiber and Webpass are investing in efforts across each of our cities to help more people connect during this difficult time, supporting organizations to help them meet the enormous technology demands for students and workers.
In several cities, including
Austin
,
San Antonio
,
San Francisco
,
Irvine
,
Provo
,
Salt Lake City
, and
Chicago
, we’ve partnered with the local public school district or their foundation to help students and their families as they adjust to schooling from home — targeting those families most impacted by the digital divide. In other places, we’ve also funded the efforts of incredible organizations to better serve their communities’ increased needs and help provide devices and hot spots to their clients:
Connecting for Good
in Kansas City
PCs for People
in Denver
Craft Lake City
in Salt Lake City
Nashville Public Library Foundation
United Way of Utah County
in Provo
Boys and Girls Club of North Alabama
in Huntsville
Latinitas
,
E4 Youth
, and
AVANCE
in Austin
We don’t know what’s going to happen next. Things are changing on a daily basis, and, like all of you, we’re working to meet the challenges and opportunities of this new normal. We do know that what you need and want from your internet — speed, reliability, great customer service — isn’t changing. We want to help you with that goal, both to help meet today’s challenges and to help take advantage of the opportunities we hope tomorrow presents.
~~~~
anchor: communities
category: company_news
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