Some 1100 communities will have to wait until next year to learn if they are among the one(s) chosen for Google’s new 1 gigabit fiber to the home network.

An announcement on Google’s official blog broke the news to anxious readers this morning:

We had planned to announce our selected community or communities by the end of this year, but the level of interest was incredible—nearly 1,100 communities across the country responded to our announcement—and exceeded our expectations. While we’re moving ahead full steam on this project, we’re not quite ready to make that announcement.

We’re sorry for this delay, but we want to make sure we get this right. To be clear, we’re not re-opening our selection process—we simply need more time to decide than we’d anticipated. Stay tuned for an announcement in early 2011.

Google has also been working on a “beta” network, serving 850 private homes and condominiums on the main campus of Stanford University, owned primarily by the faculty.

That a company the size of Google faces delays from the challenges involved in building a fiber-to-the-home network speaks to similar delays that often slow down municipal broadband deployments.  Community broadband critics often seize on such delays as evidence the networks are not viable and run by unqualified personnel.  But as Google illustrates, such delays are common whether they are run by private or public entities.