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Google Fiber -- the search giant's brand-new, ultra-high-speed internet service -- is only available in Kansas City, and even there, it only runs to homes, so there's no trying the thing out during a Kansas City hotel stay. But if you really want a taste of those 800 Mbps speeds -- that's about 100 times faster than your average internet connection -- there's another option. You can rent a room at the hacker house.
The Homes for Hackers house is a four-bedroom Kansas City abode where a group of entrepreneurs have bedded down to incubate their tech startups on an honest-to-goodness Google Fiber connection. But only three of those bedrooms are taken. The fourth one is available for rent at a price of $49 via the online vacation rental site Airbnb.
Local web developer Benjamin Barreth and his wife own the house, and they allow tech-company founders to stay there rent-free for up to three months. The idea is to attract a startup scene to Kansas City, with Google Fiber as the bait. Barreth is paying the mortgage, the electrical bill, and, yes, the Google bill out of his own pocket. So he's decided to rent the fourth room to "fiber tourists" in a bid to help cover the cost.
The house is part of a larger movement to create a startup scene around Google Fiber. There's another house just six doors down that's renting working space to entrepreneurs, and across the street from that, there's an office building renting space to a trio of startups -- though it can't offer them fiber. Barreth says that within a two-block radius of his house, there's a startup incubator, Google's own fiber operations office, and a couple other startups that have their own houses. He says about 13 companies are based in this little sliver of the neighborhood.
Barreth and Matthew Marcus, the owner of the other house, call it "KC Startup Village."
It's also called Hanover Heights, an older neighborhood with inexpensive homes that happens to be the first and only neighborhood with Google Fiber. The neighborhood is within walking distance of the bars and coffee shops of the West Port neighborhood and the upscale shops in the nearby Country Club Plaza, and that's probably why its also home to many students. "It's one of the most urban, walkable areas of Kansas City," Barreth says. "Most of KC is not like that. It's really spread-out, and you have to drive everywhere."
Barreth says the entrepreneurs working out of Marcus' house are local and don't live in the house. The Homes for Hackers house is the only live-in entrepreneur experiment in the area that Barreth knows of, and he's only letting people from out-of-town stay there. Barreth says he isn't trying to turn a profit. He's just trying to bring more jobs to Kansas City.
"It's an older house and it's run down, it's a lot of work," he says. "I have a wife and two kids and a full-time job -- this is a side project."
On Thursday afternoon, when we spoke with Barreth, no one had yet reserved the room. "I have no idea if there's a market for Fiber Tourism," he admits. "I'm sort of scared about it. It would be great if it works out and helps pay the expenses, but it would just be one more thing to do."
This story has been updated to correct the number of bedrooms in the Homes for Hackers house.
