Google Fiber Launches In Provo — and Here's What It Feels Like 338
Velcroman1 writes "I've seen the future. It's called gigabit Internet by Google Fiber, and it just launched in my hometown of Provo, Utah, the second of three scheduled cities to get speeds that are 100 times faster than the rest of America. 'What good is really fast Internet if the content stays the same?' you may ask yourself. I certainly did, before testing the service. Besides, my "high speed" Internet from Comcast seemed fast enough, enabling my household to stream HD videos, load web pages quickly, and connect multiple devices as needed, largely without hiccup. I was wrong. Using gigabit Internet, even in its infancy, opened my eyes to speed and reminded me of why I love the Internet."
Re:But... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:ISPs and Net Neutrality (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Until you experience the speed ... (Score:0, Informative)
Sure, but do you really want to live in a country where there are on average 1200 people per square mile, vs the USA where there is on average 84 people per square mile? http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0934666.html my source.
Re:Until you experience the speed ... (Score:5, Informative)
While it's true that the US has much few people per square mile, that's because most people live in cities. There's absolutely no reason that our major cities (at least) can't match the internet speeds of any other similarly sized place in the world.
New Yor City has 27,532 people per square mile. Vegas isn't even that dense and has nearly 4300 people per square mile.
Slow connection speeds in US cities have nothing at all to do with population density.
Re:Until you experience the speed ... (Score:4, Informative)
Why "stream" things as Google advertises?
Because
Streaming is stupid technology
For the consumer. For a provider, it's a godsend. Grant access to your material in some obfuscatory wrapper and call it an "app", and now you control all access, assuming you scramble the encryption keys once a week and bake them deep enough into the wrapper when you update.
It can be good consumers too -- I don't want to wait to download an entire movie before watching it, I want to click "play" and have it start playing immediately. And I don't necessarily want to store every movie or video clip I watch anyway - there are lots of things I watch only once and never want to see again. Streaming certainly can be bad for consumers, but it has its good points.
If your connection speed is fast enough that an end user can't tell the difference between it and their hard drive, there goes a good half? three quarters? of the incentive for bored nerds to liberate your content.
What does connection speed have to do with pirating content? I don't think anyone pirates a movie because it loads too slow from Netflix, given that bittorrenting a movie can take all night.
Re:Throughput? Latency? Peerings? (Score:4, Informative)
He doesn't mention latency, but he does say he clocked 915 Mb/s both up and down.
You could try reading the article.
Re: Until you experience the speed ... (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I... [wikipedia.org]
It's called SI or The International System of Units.