Just 'Topeka' It

More evidence that Google’s fiber-to-the-home sweepstakes is purely for publicity — and giggles (see Free Fiber Lunch!).

The lead-off 2010 Google April Fool’s joke: The Internet goliath is renaming itself “Topeka.”

That’s after Topeka, Kan., renamed itself “Google” as part of the nationwide suck-up fiesta by America’s local politicians to be chosen for an experimental 1-Gigabit-per-second fiber network, built compliments of Google.

As “Topeka Inc.” CEO Eric Schmidt explains in a blog post, just as “the word ‘topeka’ derives from a term used by the Kansa and Ioway tribes to refer to ‘a good place to dig for potatoes,’ we’d like to think that our website is one of the web’s top places to dig for information.” LOL?

Party-pooper Schmidt, though, notes that Google’s joke “will have no bearing on which municipalities are chosen to participate in our experimental ultra-high-speed broadband project.”

Google has an impressive history of April Fool’s jokes. One of my favorites was the Toilet Internet Service Provider (TiSP), which gave you a 8 Mbps (the free “Trickle” tier) to 32 Mbps (”Royal Flush”) connection by flushing a Google-supplied fiber-optic line down the loo. Ha!

But how is Google’s track record as an actual broadband provider?

Not as good.

There was Google’s failed bid to provide free Wi-Fi across all of San Francisco, and its strategy of bidding up the 700-MHz C-block in 2007 just to get the “open” wireless-data provisions it wanted from the FCC. You can Topeka it.

Still, considering Google basically hasn’t expended anything on the FTTH project yet except promises, “Think Big With a Gig” — even if it turns out to be a hoax — has been a boffo idea (see Behind Google’s Broadband Strategy).