It turns out that delivering gigabit fiber to the home, though a remarkable technical achievement, isn't transformative in the way that all of us living here assumed it would be.
It turns out that almost none of the internet resources commonly consumed in the home are even remotely provisioned for gigabit residential connections. ESPN.com loads about as quickly as it always did. Your Netflix streams don't look any different (the absence of buffering, while nice, is a pretty subtle thing). Even Google services, which you'd expect to be optimized for Fiber subscribers, are no faster than before. Downloads from Google Drive at my home are just as pokey as they are on my Comcast connection at the office.
A few things are amazing (Apple downloads are so fast you feel like you must be on the company LAN in Cupertino) and, if you're the rare person who can make use of it, the fact that Google Fiber also provides 1 Gbps UPSTREAM... well, words don't exist to express what that's like.
But those are the exceptions. And those exceptions are only achievable by the rare person who actually wired the house with Ethernet. Oh, and it turns out that you've also got to upgrade all of your NICs (every technically-inclined person in the city quickly discovered that Ethernet controllers in consumer PC's can't come close to pushing gigabit Ethernet, regardless of what's printed on the box).
If you're on wifi, forget it, especially if you're one of the vast majority connecting solely via the underpowered 802.11n wifi router that Google provided.
It was a source of enormous community pride when Google made the announcement. (And a source of validation for the politicians who years earlier had pushed through the municipal fiber network that Google purchased for a dollar.) Everyone was so excited to sign up, and it was great to celebrate with your neighbors as the blue and white Google Fiber vans slowly moved up your street.
But now, a couple of years in, no one really talks about it anymore. It's definitely nice. The Google folks are great to deal with if you ever have an issue (which, in any case, is exceedingly rare). The pricing is straightforward and easy to understand. But, to your average household here in Provo, on an average evening doing average things on the Internet, it just doesn't seem very different than what we had before.