

Google Fiber Brings 1Gbps Internet Speed - RaduTyrsina
http://techpp.com/2012/07/26/google-fiber-1gbps-internet-speed/

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macavity23
I'm interested to see what people use this for. Personally, I think at the
high end we're already seeing diminishing returns for consumer bandwidth.

AFAICT the highest-bandwidth usecase we have at the moment is streaming 1080p
video. We're not going to go beyond 1080p in the home any time soon due to
lounge-size/retina-density considerations. We could be watching in several
rooms in the house, let's say three to be conservative.

[http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-bandwidth-requirement-to-
st...](http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-bandwidth-requirement-to-
stream-a-1080p-HD-movie-off-a-remote-server) suggests that a h264-compressed
1080p film is about 8mbps. So for three streams, that's 24mbps.

Let's also say we're broadcasting in 3D (though I think 3D video is a
boondoggle that will go the way of laserdisc), tack on 25% for the z coord on
top of r/g/b. That's 30mbps. Let's say 50% network/buffering overhead, that's
45mbps. Maybe Little Johnny playing xbox in the den, say 50mbps. What else
could we possibly need? Yes, cloud gaming, but that's not going to take up
significantly more than 1080p.

Yes, predicting the future and so on, but I don't see any upcoming tech
developments that could require more than streaming 1080p. Once we're patching
directly into the nervous system, I guess, but that's the proverbial 20 years
away.

These things DO tail off eventually (how's your SACD collection going?), and I
think we're already close.

~~~
Tmmrn
You don't "need" it of course. And you won't use it all the time obviously.

But have you tried buying Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 yesterday? Downloading
that > 20 GB. Your 50 Mbit/s are 6.25 MByte/second and it takes 3200 seconds =
a bit less than an hour. With a Gigabit connection you need 160 seconds.

Not everybody needs a guaranteed Gigabit. But it would be nice sharing up to a
Gigabit with several people and dynamically add bandwidth if that group of
people hits the limits long enaugh.

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rajupp
This means I'd need just around 4 minutes to download Mountain Lion _sigh_

