Facebook and other Web 2.0 companies could not exist without DSL/cable/3G/4G connectivity - photos would take too long to load, for example.
Beyond increases in resolution and fidelity in multimedia, I speculate what would be truly innovative with this sort of speed. Any ideas?
For example, it would be possible to do sub-minute DNA analysis on the cloud by quickly reading a tissue sample.
They could sell that thing with practically nothing inside -- no hard drive, barely any RAM, no processor to speak of, just a screen and a keyboard -- and it could outperform the best desktops that money can buy, just by offloading computation to Google's massive data centers in real time.
Of course, in the short term latency will still be an issue. So more realistic would be to just get rid of the hard drive (why bother? It's practically the same delay to access the nearest data center's SSD as your own), but keep the RAM and GPU, and enough of the CPU to keep things running smoothly. But I definitely expect to see computation offloaded to the cloud as Internet speeds ramp up. It would be super cool to be writing a python script to test something out and just type in a call MapReduce or whatever on gigs of data, and have it Just Work in the cloud in real time.
Come to think of it; perhaps Rob Pike and Ken Thompson are already working on this in Google's secret lab? Maybe using and improving more of their old design than anybody will realize. As PG discovered in 1995 (see Beating the Averages), when your product runs on your servers, you can use whatever technology works best to implement it.
When I tried it, jobs up to 40 of their virtual cores (they load share across EC2s) would execute immediately, while more than that triggered job queuing.
That being said, to an end user, the difference between 100 nanoseconds and 100 milliseconds is - probably - very small.
1/1000000000 vs. 1/1000
Six orders of magnitude.
Edit: your point may hold true as I'm not sure SSD access or seek times are in the 10ns range.
I've seen estimates that Google fiber latency (when plugged in, to the nearest Google datacenter) could be anywhere from microseconds to 10s of milliseconds, but I don't have any reliable sources and I don't have any expertise here myself.
I'm hoping that someone who does know might chime in?
Except it's not. And 700Mbps is still only about 1/3 of the throughput of current cheap-ish laptop SSD's, and a magnitude less than higher end server grade SSD setups...
We've got quite a way to go yet, and for many types of applications, latency will remain a reason for local storage "forever" for the simple reason of speed of light.
Cloud only pays off if you're doing something major short-term (your load is spikes and then drops off for a while), or you're just plain lazy.
To do DNA analysis on the spot like that would require some more improvements in sequencing technology first before you could classify the upload to a service as the bottle-neck.
This is actually part of my YC application, to bring advancements in technology (ie, bandwith, interwebnets) to scientific data. With core facilities running huge amounts of samples, and doing it in a consistent manner that is shared in real time, we could really make some improvements to scientific advancements.
[0] - or lower the pricing, or sth.
When doing a live video conference, you can only have about a 1 to 2 second buffer before the connection becomes unusably laggy.