SAN FRANCISCO (Bloomberg) — Google Inc.'s effort to offer Internet access at speeds 100 times faster than those available today raises the bar for US cable and phone companies as the government readies a national broadband plan.

"They've just defined the new minimum," said Reed Hundt, who was chairman of the Federal Communications Commission from 1993 to 1997 and now runs an advisory firm in Washington. "They have just effectively written the first page in the report." Google's proposal, announced yesterday in a blog posting, is to build fibre-optic networks for as many as 500,000 people with connections of one gigabit per second. That's 20 times the speed of the fastest residential connections from AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and Comcast Corp., and more than 1,000 times faster than the cheapest connections. The FCC is set to introduce its broadband strategy by March 17 to ensure all US citizens have access to high-speed web service. Chairman Julius Genachowski said in a statement yesterday that Google's trial will serve as "an American testbed for the next generation" of services. By building its own network, Google would be going around AT&T, Verizon and Comcast to provide Internet access directly to homes, giving it control over how data is delivered to consumers.