And then Google said no.
Google wanted everyone in Sprague's 80-unit facility to sign up, and wanted sign-off from the city's housing authority, which owns the facility. But only nine people signed up with Google and the housing authority wouldn't foot the bill for the rest.
"We signed up for it, a bunch of us, and they say they can't do that because we're an apartment," said Sprague, 75. "I'm OK with what I have, but I think it was misrepresented to tell us we were going to get it."
Two years after Google Fiber began rolling out its super-fast Internet connections across the Kansas City area, the service hasn't improved the chronically poor Internet access in parts of the community.
It's a stubbornly persistent problem here and in nearly every other part of the country -- including Portland, where minorities, the poor and the elderly are substantially less likely to have Internet access than the population as a whole.
Google Fiber announced earlier this year it might expand Google Fiber to Portland and five suburbs. A decision could come by the end of the year.
Wiring a poor neighborhood for speed may be necessary to expand online access, but Kansas City's experience demonstrates it's not sufficient. Bringing more people online, at ever-faster speeds, will be somewhat harder and requires educating people one at a time on how to use computers and where to find access.
"The digital divide is not going to be closed digitally," said Michael Liimatta, president of Connecting for Good, a nonprofit working to expand online access in the Kansas City area.
Google has taken pains to reach out to a diverse section of Kansas City, running its fiber into low-income areas and sponsoring a "digital inclusion fund" to overcome gaps in connectivity. Its discount service -- which offers modestly speedy connections at 5 megabits per second instead of its flagship "gigabit" service -- seemed like it might broaden the web's reach to segments of the population yet to be connected.
Civic leaders and activists say it hasn't worked out that way, at least not yet.
A survey commissioned this fall by The Wall Street Journal found that just 15 percent of residents in low-income areas of Kansas City subscribe to Google Fiber, and just 5 percent are using the discount option. By comparison, more than half the homes in upper-income neighborhoods were taking Google Fiber.
A quick look at an area map puts the problem in stark relief.
Google Fiber serves much of central Kansas City and it posts an online map with dots for every apartment building with Google Fiber installed. The company publishes the data in hopes that it will encourage more landlords to pay for Google Fiber in their buildings, pitching the service as an amenity to help attract tenants.
The map shows a stark dividing line along Troost Avenue, which runs from north to south through the heart of Kansas City, Missouri. Historically a dividing line for race, it's now also a dividing line for Internet connectivity.
Google's map shows dozens of apartments with Google Fiber west of Troost, in areas that are traditionally whiter and more affluent. In the blocks immediately east of Troost there are just five Google Fiber apartments.
Google isn't shutting out low-income parts of the Kansas City area. It offers service there, on the same terms, that it does in other parts of the city -- including those seven years of free Internet for $300.
Initially, Google wanted landlords to pay a per-unit fee to hook up their buildings -- promising to reimburse them if tenants subscribed. Building owners in low-income areas rarely took the company up on the offer, anticipating their tenants couldn't afford to pay extra for a place with Google Fiber.
In Kansas City, Kansas, housing authority director Tom Scott said Google wanted $700,000 to hook up more than 2,000 apartments the agency oversees. The housing authority had paid around $3,000 to help neighborhoods where it operates to qualify for Google's service, but Scott said it didn't have the money to hook up the actual units.
"We're operating an authority that's underfunded to begin with. I don't have another 700 grand," he said. "It's not that we don't care. It's just a dollars and cents deal. When Google came through here they just were not interested."
Google Fiber quietly changed its policy and will now hook up multi-family dwellings anywhere it offers service, at no cost to landlords. But it didn't tell city leaders or housing officials of the change -- they say they didn't know until The Oregonian told them about it this past week -- and Scott says the company has shown no interest in his tenants.
"They've moved on," he said.
Google Fiber has been a wonderful partner to schools in the Kansas City area, according to Thomas E. Brenneman, director of technology for Kansas City Public Schools, one of several districts serving the city. The company is providing gigabit connections to schools in the neighborhoods it serves, significantly increasing their broadband capacity. (Portland exempted Google Fiber from a similar requirement; Google promised instead to serve an unspecified number of nonprofits and community groups.)
In homes and apartments, though, it's a different story. Even though Google Fiber serves nearly the entire area his school district does, Brenneman estimates more than half of its students don't have Internet access at home. Families living day-to-day can't afford the service, and many aren't in a house or an apartment long enough to bother setting up Internet service.
"Our community is so darn mobile," Brenneman said. "I have students that move twice in a school year."
As it awaits a decision from Google Fiber, Portland is already wrestling with its own digital divide.
Across Oregon, 82 percent of residents have broadband access at home, according to a study this year funded by the Oregon Broadband Advisory Council. But access is substantially lower among those without a high school diploma (60 percent) and those over age 65 (73 percent).
When Portland approved a broadband franchise for Google Fiber in June, city commissioners floated the possibility of subsidizing service for low-income residents. The city's Office for Community Technology says it's still researching possibilities and may have a proposal later this year.
Austin, Texas, where Google Fiber begins service this month, announced in November that it has a deal with the company to provide the company's 5 mbps service tier for free to 4,300 people living in public housing.
In Kansas City, Connecting for Good -- the nonprofit working to bridge the digital divide -- brings to mind two Portland nonprofits: the Personal Telco Project and Free Geek, each of which tackle different issues related to improving Internet access.
Like Personal Telco, Connecting for Good sets up free wireless networks to serve apartment buildings. And like Free Geek, it rehabs old computers and provides them to poor residents who complete a training program to learn to use the machines.
On a recent morning Laurette Banks, 74, brought in a laptop she'd received through the program to an office Connecting for Good shares with other social services on Troost Avenue. The laptop worked fine, but she's had trouble figuring out how to connect to her Wi-Fi network.
Google Fiber is available at her home in east Kansas City, but Banks said she's not a customer and not eager to change.
"I have considered Google," she said, "but I don't know enough about it."
Google has built a highly visible presence in Kansas City, hosting ice cream socials at "fiber rallies" to sign up new customers and packing the roadways with contractors' distinctive service trucks, each adorned with the company's signature "fiber rabbit."
But Liimatta, Connecting for Good's director, said Google Fiber has had trouble connecting with people one-to-one, especially in Kansas City's underserved communities where many people have never been online
"Treading outside of Internet culture has been a difficult thing for Google," Liimatta said.
Google is certainly trying. The company says it's working with a dozen different organizations in the Kansas City area -- including Connecting for Good -- on bringing more people online.
Success, according to the company, requires making the Internet affordable, teaching them how to get online, and showing people what it can do. And Google says the best way to do that is to find community groups in each of its market to help, people who already have connections to the customers Google wants to reach.
"The most successful initiatives we have to close the digital divide are ones where we're working with local partners," said Erica Swanson, head of community impact programs for Google Fiber. "Communities are eager to address it and if we work together we can actually make a dent in it."
Connecting for Good receives financial support and Chromebook laptops through Google Fiber, and Liimatta said he plans to install Google Fiber in his own home. It's a great service, he said, but it's designed for the top tier of Internet users -- not the entry level.
"The engineers have basically set the tone for Google inside Kansas City," Liimatta said. "It's much more that than it is the social agenda."
©2014 The Oregonian (Portland, Ore.)
