Exclusive: Google Fiber is coming to Huntersville. What we know about the plans.

Google Fiber is planning to expand its high speed internet service to Huntersville this year, a company official said this week.

“We’re about to expand into Huntersville, and we are super-excited about this,” Jess George, head of government and community affairs for Google Fiber’s East region, told The News & Observer in an exclusive interview.

“It’s obviously a very large community,” George said.

George told The Charlotte Observer that construction would begin in April with the first customers able to get service this fall.

“The entire construction project should take two to three years to complete,” George said Thursday. “Our goal is to construct our network to as many Huntersville residents as possible.”

Digging to install lines is expected to begin this summer, and the company is still determining where construction will start, she said.

Google Fiber arrived in Charlotte in July 2016. The first neighborhood to get the Gigabit high-speed internet service was Highland Creek, which is mostly north of Interstate 485, The Charlotte Observer previously reported.

Google Fiber doesn’t disclose its exact number of customers in communities, George said. The company, however, has increased its availability in the Charlotte metro area by more than 75% over the past year, she said, “and we are continuing to build at that pace.”

Besides Huntersville, Google Fiber is “actively constructing and serving customers in neighboring Concord, she said. Google Fiber served its first Concord customers in 2022.

“We hope to have additional communities to announce in the coming months,” George said in an email. “We’re also continuing to build out our network in Charlotte and Matthews as well.

Google Fiber will alert residents about upcoming construction by placing door hangers three days before work begins, George said.

“Our Google Fiber construction hot line is staffed 24/7, answering construction questions and tracking concerns to resolution,” George added.

Huntersville’s expected population boom

Huntersville is a natural location for Google Fiber’s Charlotte-area expansion, George said.

“When Google Fiber launched our service in Charlotte in 2016, the first customers we were able to serve were in the neighborhood of Highland Creek, just south of Huntersville and west of Concord,” George said.

“Since that time, we have continued to build various neighborhoods in Charlotte, but hoped to be able to bring service to the City of Concord and the Town of Huntersville.”

Huntersville’s 2040 Plan predicts the town population will explode 74% between 2018 and 2040, to 106,567. The plan was established to guide the growth.

That’s on top of an already dramatic population rise, according to the plan.

“Thanks to the proximity to Charlotte, employment opportunities, and high quality of life, the Town’s population has more than doubled from 2000 to 2018,” according to the plan.

George said Huntersville and Hillsborough, north of Chapel Hill, are the North Carolina towns that Google Fiber is expanding into this year.