Google Fiber Brings 1Gbps Internet Speed

http://techpp.com/2012/07/26/google-fiber-1gbps-internet-speed/

by RaduTyrsina • 14 years ago

4 5 14 years ago

rajupp• 14 years ago

This means I'd need just around 4 minutes to download Mountain Lion sigh

macavity23• 14 years ago

I'm interested to see what people use this for. Personally, I think at the high end we're already seeing diminishing returns for consumer bandwidth.

AFAICT the highest-bandwidth usecase we have at the moment is streaming 1080p video. We're not going to go beyond 1080p in the home any time soon due to lounge-size/retina-density considerations. We could be watching in several rooms in the house, let's say three to be conservative.

http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-bandwidth-requirement-to-st... suggests that a h264-compressed 1080p film is about 8mbps. So for three streams, that's 24mbps.

Let's also say we're broadcasting in 3D (though I think 3D video is a boondoggle that will go the way of laserdisc), tack on 25% for the z coord on top of r/g/b. That's 30mbps. Let's say 50% network/buffering overhead, that's 45mbps. Maybe Little Johnny playing xbox in the den, say 50mbps. What else could we possibly need? Yes, cloud gaming, but that's not going to take up significantly more than 1080p.

Yes, predicting the future and so on, but I don't see any upcoming tech developments that could require more than streaming 1080p. Once we're patching directly into the nervous system, I guess, but that's the proverbial 20 years away.

These things DO tail off eventually (how's your SACD collection going?), and I think we're already close.

Tmmrn• 14 years ago

You don't "need" it of course. And you won't use it all the time obviously.

But have you tried buying Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 yesterday? Downloading that > 20 GB. Your 50 Mbit/s are 6.25 MByte/second and it takes 3200 seconds = a bit less than an hour. With a Gigabit connection you need 160 seconds.

Not everybody needs a guaranteed Gigabit. But it would be nice sharing up to a Gigabit with several people and dynamically add bandwidth if that group of people hits the limits long enaugh.

rje• 14 years ago

Existing things I can think of: * Gaming streaming services like gaikai/onlive - as people continue to get bigger monitor resolutions (like the new retina mbp), they're going to want those resolutions supported eventually.

* Game downloads in general - Downloading some games is upwards of 20 gigabytes, which is fairly slow on most networks

Regardless, it's a step in the right direction IMO - a huge part of the USA is still on a connection that can't reasonably do any of the things you and I have mentioned. If google wants to work on fixing that, I'm happy to let them.

laserDinosaur• 14 years ago

From what Google was saying a while back, the reason we don't see people making programs that consume 1GB of data is because nobody can consume 1GB of data. The theory is that if that much bandwidth is available, new technologies will be built to utilize it, even though we might not be able to conceive what those are right now. Is it possible that we will all have these connections and do the same old thing we are doing now? Possibly, but we could have also been perfectly content with single core chips.

Google Fiber Brings 1Gbps Internet Speed

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