Google announced Friday that it will build an ultra-high speed broadband network for a residential subdivision at Stanford University.

The community houses about 850 faculty and staff from the California-based university, and Google said it will offer residents Internet speeds up to 1 gigabit per second; more than 100 times what most people have access to today. Google said it will break ground in early 2011.

The news comes about eight months after Google announced plans to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the U.S. Google asked interested communities to submit proposals for consideration, and the company was soon inundated with requests. Topeka, Kansas even temporarily renamed itself Google, Kansas in an effort to attract Google's support.

The Stanford project, however, will be separate from the community fiber effort, James Kelly, a Google product manager, wrote in a blog post. The community selection process is still ongoing.

"Our ultimate goal is to build to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people, and we still plan to announce our selected community or communities by the end of the year," Kelly wrote.

The Stanford residential subdivision, therefore, will be Google's first "beta" deployment to real customers, and will be a key step towards the goal of bringing 1 gigabit per second to communities around the country.

"We'll be able to take what we learn from this small deployment to help scale our project more effectively and efficiently to much larger communities," Kelly said.

Google selected Stanford because the school was open to having Google experiment with new fiber technologies in its street. The university is also located near Google's Mountain View headquarters, so engineers will be able to easily monitor the project, Kelly said.