Politics & Government

San Leandro Library Wins Internet Speed Race

A 4 p.m. ceremony at the Main Library today will christen the city's new 100 megabit per second Internet connection, an early dividend of the Lit San Leandro fiber optic loop.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, which Bay Area public library has the fastest Internet connection of all?

San Leandro.

That will be the case at 4 p.m. today, when city officials host a ceremony at the Main Library to turn on a new 100 megabit per second Internet feed. It will be 10 times faster than the library's current Internet connection.

Find out what's happening in San Leandrowith free, real-time updates from Patch.

A spreadsheet listing the Internet speeds of more than 220 libraries in the Bay Area shows that San Leandro's new system will offer the speediest access by far.

Our new library Internet connection is one of the first public payoffs to flow from local entrepreneur Patrick Kennedy's Lit San Leandro initiative.

Find out what's happening in San Leandrowith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Lit San Leandro is an 11-mile fiber optic loop that has been touted in the Wall Street Journal, among other media, as giving this city one of the most advanced Internet infrastructures in the United States.

Kennedy and city officials -- who will be on hand for today's ceremony -- hope and expect these high speed fiber lines will make San Leandro a destination for advanced manufacturing, biomedical research, data farms, customer support centers and other businesses that demand bandwidth.

But today the focus will be on the fact the San Leandro Public Library is now the fastest, freest place in the Bay Area to plug into the 21st Century.

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