Marking a new advance in the direction of its fiber-optic network plans, Google has announced the appointment of networking engineer Milo Medin as the company’s VP of access services, responsible for managing the fiber team.

Medin, 48, who will oversee the rollout of Google’s fiber-optic network, is widely known as an expert in Internet networking, and is credited with pushing TCP/IP as a standard for Internet connectivity in the 1980s.

The immediate responsibility that Medin – the co-founder of the first major US residential broadband provider, @Home Network – will undertake at Google will be to help the company decide the location for building a high-speed Internet demonstration network.

In response to Google’s February announcement of its plans to build its own fiber network, total of 1,078 cities, counties and states filed applications to boast their credentials for being the location where the planned 1-gigabit network could be built. Google is likely to announce the winner early next year.

Saying that the strength of the response to Google’s high-speed network proposal had surprised him, Medin said in an interview that his key responsibilities at Google will go well beyond the selection of the winning city and the actual construction of the demonstration network.

Medin said: “Google can bring scale and innovation to this (broadband Internet) space, and that was enticing enough for me to turn down some things that were pretty interesting to come here and see about delivering the future.”