The pursuit of faster internet connection speeds in Chapel Hill will produce a month of traffic delays for motorists who depend on access to Ephesus Church Road.

Traffic along that road will be consolidated onto one lane from Tinkerbell Road to Colony Woods Drive during the hours of 9:00 AM and 4:00 PM while contractors affiliated with Google install underground vaults and cables.

The installation is part of Google’s plan to establish itself as a cable television provider while offering internet speeds of up to 1,000 megabits per second to customers in over 20 US cities.

AT&T has a similar plan that led to a water line break earlier this year in Chapel Hill. Outages from the break forced the Montessori Community School on Pope Road to close for a day.

Delays and inconveniences for residents may be germane to fiber-optic network installation, as other cities working with Google have reported hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage to utilities and private property.

Google contractors in Charlotte were billed over $450,000 for damage associated with water and gas line breaks. The same work done in Nashville by crews associated with Google produced over $260,000 in water line damage.

The construction of Google’s fiber network in Chapel Hill is likely to continue through 2017, with the company expected to spend approximately $1 billion on the project.

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