Ask HN: What potential innovation would occur with Gigabit internet? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What potential innovation would occur with Gigabit internet?

4 pointsmpg3313 comments

Average speeds now are roughly 15Mbps. What would speeds of 1 Gbps allow to change on the internet?

Facebook exists in its current form because of broadband. Along with Instagram, etc. Running Facebook of even circa 2008 without broadband is painful. In a way broadband adoption let websites like Facebook and many others come into existence.

With 1 Gbps, I think it will be similar. We'll see websites with components that wouldn't be possible without it, but those components themselves (uploading photos of your drunk college friends) were possible to some degree beforehand.

I don't think it will be a radical transformation where suddenly doctors preform robot surgery as envisioned with things like Internet2, but I could see, say, more Skype meetings with your doctor as the video quality and sound quality increase.

I suspect we'll see omnipresent, always-on video cameras everywhere.

Forget Street View, we'll have Street Camera, maybe always-on connection to Google Glasses? (I think there were several sci-fi books on the subject).

There are already many obsessed bosses connecting to work even on their holidays, maybe now they'll own a telepresence robot.

I'm sure there'll be a lot of good uses :) but the current mindset makes me think of these possibilities first.

I think the surprising answer may be: not all that much.

Look at how fast computers are these days. No one (except gamers and professionals) have needed faster computers in 5 years. Once we all got fast dual core machines with 4GB ram it's pretty much all been gravy. Mobile devices are starting to reach that level now.

I don't doubt that there will be some very compelling applications for gigabit speeds, but I don't think it will be a revolutionary thing.

1-10 Gbps would fall into the similar speed as SATA disk drives. That speed would be the "Retina Display" of Network Speed, where you forget if the file is stored locally or remotely. You can entirely get rid of your local drive and boot the system from Dropbox or similar network drive.

I believe it will change audio/visual applications.

HDMI will be a thing of the past because you will be able to transfer the highest quality audio and video over the Cat5/6 cable including internet data.

Movie Theaters could be democratized if you could view movies over the cable allowing those wanting to start a theater to have direct access to new movies via a subscription model.

Audio/Visual is where it will be - I can see it as clear as I can see this laptop in front of me.

Also, this is where Microsoft's kinect patent to see how many people are in a room could come in handy to ensure the subscription model isn't abused in case profit sharing is a prerequisite by the production companies.

Telepresence. Sites like nugs.net could stream concerts from large venues to many smaller venues in realtime & sold out shows could entertain new audiences in remote locations.

There's a project out of Canada called Scenic & Scenic2 that currently uses Internet2 to do this: http://code.sat.qc.ca/redmine/projects/scenic2/wiki

IMHO the key is not download speed, but upload. That would change a lot.

How so?

Less centralization.

Quick video uploading and allowing everyone to self host webservices with a multitude of users I guess

This comes up every time this question is asked, but no one is going to self host web services. It's just too much of a pain.

Additional off-site RAM?

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