East Lawrence residents may want to momentarily put on hold their plans to become rich using super-fast Internet connections at their homes. (Yes, this may affect your plans to sell online all those tie-dyed Kansas City Royals T-shirts you made this weekend.) A pilot project to bring gigabit Internet service to parts of East Lawrence appears to be shrinking.

An official with Wicked Broadband has told me the company, at the suggestion of City Hall staff, is now asking the city for a $300,000 loan guarantee rather than the $1 million loan guarantee the company has been seeking for several months. But that means the geographic size of the pilot project also is shrinking. The proposal now is to provide the super-fast Internet service to 300 addresses, down from the original proposal of 1,000. Josh Montgomery, an owner of Wicked, told me that means the project likely will be more downtown-oriented. The original proposal was to extend service to downtown, parts of East Lawrence and a couple of other pockets of town. Montgomery said he’s in the process of drawing a new service map, but said the area in East Lawrence will shrink.

What will be interesting now is to see if the smaller size of the project helps it win the three votes needed on the City Commission. Commissioners will be discussing the latest Wicked proposal at their Tuesday evening meeting. What’s becoming clear as this project stretches on is that other private providers in the region are amping up their efforts in Lawrence.

We’ve already reported on the announcements by WOW, the largest Internet service provider in the city. It has committed to double its Internet speeds by January, and it recently has said it will begin offering 200 Mbps service at some point in 2015.

But the more interesting proposal may be from a Baldwin City-based company that is telling city commissioners that it can bring gigabit service to a broad area of Lawrence without a city loan guarantee or other similar incentives.

The company is RG Fiber, and we have reported on its plans before. But the group will be making its most detailed presentation yet to city commissioners on Tuesday night. The company also is hosting a big event in Baldwin on Wednesday to launch its gigabit project there. Gov. Sam Brownback and several Baldwin City and Baker University officials are scheduled to be in Baldwin City on Wednesday. RG Fiber won’t be turning on any gigabit service as part of the event, but rather will begin the sign-up period for homes and businesses in Baldwin that want the service. Mike Bosch, the top executive with RG Fiber, said he expects to begin offering service to 500 locations in Baldwin City by the summer, with construction beginning in the spring. Bosch said Baker University is driving demand for the service in Baldwin City, a significant number of local businesses and households have signed up for the service, which is being offered for $75 a month.

One of the key lines of fiber optic cable RG will use for the Baldwin City project will run through Lawrence. Bosch said that is a key reason why his company is in a position to provide gigabit service to parts of Lawrence. Bosch has unveiled a map that shows he could provide gigabit service to downtown, the Sixth Street corridor, the Iowa Street corridor, and the 23rd Street corridor in Lawrence.

Like Wicked, he is seeking to lease excess capacity that exists in the city-owed fiber optic cable that rings the city. Bosch said the company is proposing to pay $300 a month for access to four strands of cable. The proposal also includes language about asking the city to donate some land at the city’s Venture Park to house a data center and technology building for the company. But Bosch said that part of the proposal isn’t a deal-killer, and was included to forecast that the company may approach the city about the possibility in the future.

The main point Bosch is trying to highlight is his company does not need any loan guarantee from the city. And he says if the city does provide a loan guarantee to Wicked, he will kill any plans to bring gigabit service to Lawrence.

“If the city intervenes and funds our competitors, it is just not a smart business move for us to invest money and compete with the city of Lawrence,” Bosch said. “If the city does this, it looks like it has an emotional connection to one of my competitors that is so strong, that it wouldn’t make sense for anybody to go in and compete with that because you would never know where the city’s support would end.”

Montgomery, though, counters that it is no coincidence that interest in the Lawrence broadband market has picked up once Wicked started proposing bringing gigabit service to town.

“We feel like this competition is a direct result of us pushing this project forward,” Montgomery said. “The city should be working to get the best deal it can for consumers.”

The whole situation creates an interesting issue for the city: Does offering an incentive to one company create a disincentive to another company? Or is this all just posturing on the part of competitors? Will I ever be able to sell these 30,000, tie-dyed, Mike Moustakas bath robes?

In other news and notes from around town:

• Keep an eye out for construction work at 925 Iowa St. Montgomery confirmed to me that his company has signed a lease for 5,000 square feet of space in the building that is adjacent to the Hillcrest Shopping Center. Plans call for part of it to house technical equipment related to Wicked Broadband, but a good portion of it will be an enterprise called the Lawrence Center for Entrepreneurship. I’ll bring you more details as I get them, but it sounds like Montgomery and his wife, Lawrence school board member Kris Adair, will be providing a place where startup businesses can rent office space, have access to a business attorney and other types of experts.

• There is one less place in town to buy a Kansas City Royals hat. Lids, the store that specialized in hats of athletic teams, has closed its downtown Lawrence location. A sign on the door is directing people to check out its locations in the Kansas City area. The space at 729 Massachusetts doesn’t yet have a new tenant, said Jon Francis of Francis Sporting Goods, who is part of the ownership group of the building. Francis said a search has begun to fill the space, and a retail user is the main focus. He said the space likely would not work to house a restaurant.

“Retail is definitely what we want,” Francis said.