Google has announced that it’s going to build a gigabit fiber network to nearly every home in Kansas City. See Google’s blog for more details. Consumer internet lines today are typically less than 20 megabits per second. That’s a cap, meaning your actual speed will be much less. Also remember that a bit is different from a byte. So downloading at 20 megabits does not equate to download at 20 megabytes per second. To do the conversion, a gigabit line will provide 125 megabytes per second service to your home. That’s a gigabyte (GB) of data in 8 seconds. For context, a DVD is 4.7GB. That will take 37 seconds to download. A blueray disc is 50GB. That will take you a bit under seven minutes.
All this is theoretical of course. In reality, we’re not really downloading raw data files. We’re streaming.
Gigabit access will allow new applications that don’t exist for consumer use. For example, HD video conferencing. Or streaming HD videos, or steaming high quality music. Even then, the applications aren’t even invented yet because the infrastructure isn’t available.
Google’s project is aimed at proving to the industry, and ultimately to the consumers of the possibilities of truly high speed Internet. The hope is that this would spur demand and be a kick in the behind to the telecom companies to build out the infrastructure.
I can’t even imagine what other applications there will be. How would you use a gigabit line?