Two Cities with Blazing Internet Speed Search for a Killer App

The only thing I've downloaded legit over bittorrent is linux distros.

Yes, you could stream from your home, or host 32-person fps servers, or whatever. But in the end it comes down to being able to grab a 30G encode of a movie from a blu-ray source in a few minutes.

And if hollywood ever offered it, I'd pay them for it.

Obviously this can't really take off until gigabit fiber is much more widespread. So I can see that there might not be much benefit in being one of the first few locales to get it.

Is there even any affordable hi-def video camera, including hi-def stereo audio? I haven't actually looked in a long time.

Going from ADSL to ethernet reduces latency by order of magnitude for the connection to local internet. That is the big jump. And that latency reduction helps gamers too. This is the big advantage of going for Fiber instead of lets try how we can put as much bandwidth as possible through this copper never designer for it.

As for bandwidth, lets consider the other side of story where you get those bits from, they too have limited bandwidth and have to support maybe thousands of simultaneous users with it.

And once they found the killer app for the 1Gbit internet they are not going to recognize that. As bandwidth is only visible when there seems to be too little of it, not when there is enough of it, and those who have too little of it often just need to wait some additional seconds and never realize that it could be almost instant, and totally miss the point of having additional bandwidth. Only way to recognize the killer app for this is use with Gbit fiber and then go with friends house and use it with their ADSL and realize you cannot stand how slow/limited it is.

Once you start replacing last mile with Fiber there is no point trying to save few bucks in an expensive project and have order of magnitude less bandwidth than what they reasonably can offer.

Imagine a p2p social network that worked more like messaging. Your posts, instead of going to and having to trust a central keeper (e.g. Facebook), would go directly to recipients.

At most we'd need generic store-and-forward services if we want to assume users won't be running computers that are up most of the time. We could just piggy-back on the email network, broadcasting posts to your friends via PGP encrypted email, with some special subject prefix or header, so your mailbox rules can keep them from cluttering you normal inbox, and so your social network client can pull, decrypt and display them in your "news feed".

Or we could use the BitTorrent protocol or similar for distribution. Again, PGP encrypted so other nodes that aren't the recipient of your post could still act to store and forward.

Every game could in effect have their custom fixed configuration "game console" as hardware, instead of having to target the lowest common denominator of PC configurations or out of date console hardware.

Networked multiplayer games would be freed from targeting the slowest common denominator in net connections, and would instead have intra-datacenter levels of latency and bandwidth to game servers.

We would infact be enjoying this now if progress in deployed broadband speeds hadn't slowed to a crawl 10 or so years ago.

1) Terms of Service

I believe that the Google Fiber terms of service prevents you from running a server on the line. That kills 99% of the interesting applications that having fast internet would be used for.

2) (Lack of) Network Effect

Since nobody else has anything at that speed, there is no useful application to take advantage of that level of bandwidth. In addition, none of the SharingSocialAdultery startups are going to put forth anything for that level of bandwidth since to a first approximation the number of people who have that kind of bandwidth is zero.

In fact, both speed and low lag make a great multiplayer experience.

First world problem.