Google Fiber Brings 1Gbps Internet Speed
techpp.com
techpp.com
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.
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.
* 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.