The company had planned to declare the winner by the end of this year, but it said Wednesday that the decision is being postponed.

However, a decision is coming soon, according to Milo Medin, Google's vice president of access services. 

Perhaps by early 2011.

Here's the note Medin sent out:

Hello from Google,

Earlier this year your community expressed interest in our experimental ultra high-speed broadband network, and I wanted to send you a quick update on where that project stands.

First, I’m excited to announce that this week I joined Google as Vice President of Access Services, where I’ll be overseeing the Google Fiber team. So far I’ve been getting up to speed on the progress our team has made over the past several months – from experimenting with new fiber deployment technologies here on Google’s campus, to announcing a “beta” network to 850 homes at Stanford – and I’m excited for us to take the next step of bringing our ultra high-speed network to a community.

Second, this morning we plan to announce that Google will be delaying the announcement of our selected community or communities. We had planned to announce 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.

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, but simply need more time to decide than we had anticipated. Stay tuned for an announcement in early 2011.

Thank you again for your enthusiasm and interest in our project.

Milo Medin

Vice President, Access Services

Google