Bringing ultra high-speed broadband to Stanford homes | Hacker News Reader

Bringing ultra high-speed broadband to Stanford homes

googleblog.blogspot.com

26 pointsprocessing16 comments

These homes are just for staff/professors. It would be lovely if the student residencies have access to high speed broadband as well. :-)

Yeah, I think they have been focusing on installing wireless access points in the residences instead of upgrading the wired speeds, which have probably been at 100 Mbps for over a decade. Still, hard to complain, as I haven't ever seen any non-datacenter computer get more than 100 Mbps on the Internet.

I used to work in the ResHalls as Berkeley, and I can tell you a couple of reasons they haven't done a Gig-E upgrade. The first is that the upgrade from 10Mbps to 100Mbps was easy, because they just had to change out the switches and router blades, which require upgrades every few years anyway.

Going from 100 to 1000 is a lot harder, because the physical cables in the wall are on the cheap side (it is a University after all) and can't support Gig-E. So it would require a complete rewiring of the res Halls.

That, coupled with that fact that generally speaking there is little difference in speed when talking to the internet at 100 vs. 1000, it just isn't worth the upgrade. Most students don't notice/care, and also most of them just want to be able to move their laptops around without dealing with cables. They just want the internet to work wherever they happen to be on campus.

That's nice, but what on Earth would any reasonable mortal do with one gigabit per second internet access?

My standard Comcast cable can download high-def video faster than I can play it. What more could one reasonably want?

Answering that question is exactly why Google is performing this experiment.

"640K ought to be enough for anybody."

i think the next big thing will be telepresence. rent a robot in some unfamiliar city to kill an hour before dinner is ready.

I parsed that incorrectly, but yes, I would totally be willing to rent a killer robot.

Multiple simultaneous high-def video download in every room. More ads to sell.

Won't staff and professors have different usage patterns than the average college student? It might not show realistic usage ...

Presumably this is a good test of high end usage. It seems like they are using this is a stress test, not so much a "regular usage" test.

Although, not all of those professors are Computer Science, and they have famillies that live with them, with kids and husbands and wives that have normal jobs.

Most of them probably use the Internet the same way as any well to do professional and their family would.

Universities have great connections. How about serving some of the under served communities first?

That's what they're planning to do. This is a test, not a deployment.

I am so hard right now.

Nice for Stanford. Not so nice for all the communities that applied only to watch Google pick Stanford some ~7 miles away.

"To be clear, this trial is completely separate from our community selection process for Google Fiber, which is still ongoing"

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