Ask HN: what would you do with a gigabit Internet connection?

5 points·dholowiski··5 comments

What new things could you do, with a symmetrical gigabit Internet connection? Or maybe you live in one of the Kansas Cities, what are you going to do with your gigabit Internet connection?

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I took seven minutes of video today of employees running around the opening day line at the new Apple Store Passeig de Gràcia. Seven minutes of video was 855 MB. It took me over two hours to upload seven minutes of video to youtube using the local DSL service.

When everybody can upload at non-braindead speeds, I'd expect some reddit-like site to pop up with a video commenting mechanism. Higher throughput decreases the amount of forethought you need before starting an upload and increases the time you can iterate over a heavy (space-wise) project/media/project/subject.

Its not really what I would do with a gigabit link. There aren't many servers that could supply me with anything that fast nowadays. I think most people would answer something like "...ummm torrent a lot?"

The real interesting stuff happens when everyone has a gigabit link. That's when the cool stuff that no one has even considered starts happening.

This is a really great point. Two things that come to mind would be a huge improvement in the gaming industry and with video conferences. I can only imagine a world without observable lag. That would be fantastic.

Stream movies and music 24/7 to myself, my family, my friends and their families, people I meet on the street, vagrants, etc. That and I might even have some bandwidth left over when people are using bittorrent on the network (yeah right).

Edit HD videos in the cloud

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