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GREENSBORO — Click a button and your thought goes zipping from your laptop into the world.

Before you can blink, it hops on a ray of light and gets beamed along strands of glass, and boom: your wry comment lands on Facebook.

It may sound space age — at least as it concerns the ray of light –– but it isn’t. It’s a fiber-optic Internet connection.

Google plans to extend these fiber-optic lines to up to 500,000 people — right to their front doors. Greensboro techies and leaders are hoping to convince Google executives that the Gate City, with its dearth of Internet provider competition for home users, is an ideal test site.

“Google is basically raising the bar,” said Javier Gomez, CEO of Greensboro-based Dynamic Quest, a local Internet service company.

Surfing the Web via high-speed — or broadband — Internet is so last millennium.

Your DSL or cable Internet connection might be faster than that old-school dial-up users first deployed to get online. But it’s a similar technology.

Information, be it pictures or words or files, travels via electricity along copper wires buried underground or strung from poles.

They’re the same kind of wires that bring you telephone calls or cable programs to your television and have been around, in some cases, for decades.

Fiber-optic cables can be run along roadways and utility poles just like other cables. But they use light and super-thin glass as a means of travel, which allows data to move at much quicker rates. Google estimates it could provide service up to 100 times faster than what most Americans have.

Although most Internet service providers use fiber in some portion of their networks, data can get gummed up when it travels that last mile — along a copper wire — to your home computer.

DSL and cable do the job for most home users. While most U.S. cities are plugging along that superhighway at respectable rates, countries in Europe and Asia have upped their speeds beyond NASCAR levels.

But you can’t hit 200 mph if you don’t have a super-slick track — and Greensboro residents don’t have that yet.

“The rest of the world is getting this, why aren’t we doing this?” said Jay Ovittore, a local resident who has advocated for better telecommunication access in Greensboro.

It’s got a bit to do with the sheer size of the country, Internet technology experts say. It takes a lot of cable to connect everyone.

Tech observers say the lack of competition in the U.S. telecommunications market has stymied innovation and progress.

“If there were strong competition it would have never happened,” said Jonathan Davis, a senior network manager for Honda Power Equipment.

“I think that is really what Google is trying to do here because they see, for the most part, things are not moving forward because there is not strong competition.”

Some major U.S. Internet providers that serve local customers have built fiber networks in other communities. Melissa Buscher, a Time Warner spokeswoman, said the company doesn’t plan to offer fiber to homes in the area. But she said the company has worked to increase speeds in other ways.

“We are delivering what customers demand at this point. One gigabit (the speed Google may offer) is pretty fast and it comes with a price,” Buscher said.

Time Warner’s speed of 10 megabits per second — 1 percent as fast — is what home users are demanding, Buscher said.

Some observers say it’s not a lack of demand that has left the country behind.

The town of Wilson built its own $28 million, 300-mile fiber-optic network. The city estimates it will make a profit in three years.

“We want to make sure Wilson businesses have the very best tools to do businesses,” said Brian Bowman, a city spokesman. “The world is flat. We are living in a global world. They need to be able to communicate.”

So what happens if Google Fiber comes to Greensboro, connecting every man, woman and child to the fastest Internet speeds in the world?

There are serious applications, techies say. For instance, companies such as Google could use the faster access to run programs such as its word processing program, Google Docs, online instead of on your computer.

Home users might also notice a change when they put stuff out to the world. Upload speeds are likely to significantly improve with fiber Internet, Davis said.

Did you use that fancy new video camera to take a high definition video of your toddler taking his first steps? Now you can share it with Grammy in Connecticut — in minutes, instead of hours.

“That is where I start to see the strength in this and why is it different,” Davis said.

Contact Amanda Lehmert at 373-7075 or amanda.lehmert@news-record.com