This is high in the running for the dumbest article I've ever seen on HN. Send that U-Verse internet connection back to 1983 and you'd get the same response - "this speed is cool, but it doesn't really let me do anything NEW". We need technology that serves for the things we might do in the future, not merely for the things we want to do today. Because we never know what technology from today we'll be stuck with deep into the future.
Journalist fails to see the potential in new technology, film at 11.<p>Who needs to play five high def videos at once? Uh, a household of five people? Anyone who has shared a home with a gamer knows what it is like to have them come bounding into your room shouting "are you downloading something?!?!"
Reminds me of when Wile E Coyote caught the Road Runner. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=KJJW7EF5aVk#t=63s" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=KJJW7EF5aVk#t=63s</a><p>What I want to know is what the backbone is. My guess is that the 1Gbps to the leaf nodes is good now because they don't have <i>that</i> many users and most of the users don't have a need that uses more than a small fraction of the 1Gbps (on average). What happens when they get 10s, 100s, or 1000s of homes / businesses signed up? When will they saturate their backbone? Once that happens, then what?<p>Hmmm, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_Carrier_transmission_rates" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_Carrier_transmission_ra...</a> says 40Gbps is top end and, based on the dates mentioned, there are probably quite a bit of connectivity at 2.5/10/40Gbps... but that is only 2/10/40 leaf nodes. This doesn't seem like it will scale very well :-/<p>Outdated info:<p>There are a fair number of maps of the internet backbones on Google, but they tend to be undated and, I'm pretty sure, are grossly out of date (10+ years out of date).
<a href="http://www.nthelp.com/maps.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.nthelp.com/maps.htm</a><p>This looks more up-to-date: <a href="http://1stnt.com/uunet_backbone.htm" rel="nofollow">http://1stnt.com/uunet_backbone.htm</a> and <a href="http://1stnt.com/connectivity2.htm" rel="nofollow">http://1stnt.com/connectivity2.htm</a> Top speed backbone links on those maps are OC-48 (2.5Gbps).
It's underwhelming for what we have now, but Google isn't running Google Fiber to allow a bunch of teenagers to download 1080p movies in seconds, it's running a network that will serve as a testbed of things that currently require too much bandwidth and couldn't be done with your usual DSL connection. Youtube couldn't exist in 1993 not only because average computers couldn't cope with video, but because internet connections, where they existed, were too slow. Even Facebook, with pictures, video and quick jumping from pages to pages, couldn't exist. The big thing of 2023 hasn't been invented yet, but it will require more than 10 Mbps.<p>For instance, lately I've noticed that when I'm reading a Wikipedia entry, I search Youtube for things that are mentioned in the article. This has improved my experience greatly. Say I'm reading the article about a man called Billionaire McPennybags. In the past, I'd read this bit of trivia: "In 1993, Billionaire McPennybags made an appearance in a late night TV show, where he accused Veryrich O'Inheritance of stealing his idea for a egg toaster". Now, I can search YouTube for 'mcpennybags egg toaster veryrich' and I can watch video of the interview and of the ensuing controversy.<p>It's a (very) dumb example, but in the next decade we'll find ways to use our spare megabits and something better will appear.
Perhaps. But if I could buy 5% of their stated capacity? (i.e. 50Mbps up and down) for $50, that would be a huge improvement.<p>My theory is that Google realized they could not penetrate last-mile infrastructure in any significant way. However, by demonstrating an extreme amount of bandwidth is possible at reasonable cost, they could influence bandwidth/ prices/ availability over a much greater geographical area.<p>I also find it odd when people exclaim how unnecessary certain technologies are until other folks step-up and show what can be enabled with these "unnecessary" technologies. On top of that, I also believe hyper-decentralized services would be easily possible as consumer connections approach/attain 1Gbps last-mile, So, it is weird (to me) for a major "cloud" provider to demonstrate and enble that potential.
The weird thing about end-user Internet is that at least at MIT, I had 10/100 Ethernet in my residence in the mid/late 1990s, as did thousands of other people. I assume other college students at the time did, too. (true, it wasn't like MIT had enough transit to really do WAN stuff at those speeds for everyone all the time, but there were ftp servers, p2p file sharing, etc. all on-LAN) And I assume a lot of colleges have continued to upgrade since then. So, there should be lots of people with high speed Internet experience.
Only someone with no idea of, or appreciation for the rapid rate of technological advancement would deem a 1GB connection unnecessary.<p>The sad thing is that this reflects the current thinking of politicians (Especially in Australia) I wouldn't actually be surprised if this was published in the SMH to help undermine public opinion of the national broadband network currently being rolled out here.
This would make the Google Pixel actually worthwhile. Most of the complaints about the pixel were that Internet speeds aren't good enough to use the Internet as "local" storage. Well, now you can. If you're in Kansas City.
i think its incredibly sad that the author and maybe many others fail to see the bigger implications of Google attempting to bypass the current isp monopoly and introduce real competition. As there are many accounts of current subscribers in the KC area getting amazing offers from the current batch of providers due to the threat of Google. If they can't compete by features then they have to compete by price.
The author should have answered questions like what are their policies on privacy (monitoring your internet use), availability (uptime), and sharing (free wifi for anyone nearby)?<p>I would hazard a guess, being that this is both a residential and an obviously subsidised service, less than stellar answers to all of the above.