
Two Cities with Blazing Internet Speed Search for a Killer App - petethomas
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/06/technology/two-cities-with-blazing-internet-speed-search-for-a-killer-app.html
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anon4
Piracy. The killer app for high-speed internet is torrenting and piracy. Ok,
and Steam. Maybe really long movies on youtube, though I wouldn't watch an
actual movie on youtube - they don't pay as much attention to good compression
as movie pirates.

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.

~~~
sosuke
I don't have a full gigabit connection yet, 700 megabits down and up right
now, but piracy was easy on a normal broadband connection. The killer app I
want from my connection is no buffering on YouTube, Netflix, and other
streaming services. There is no excuse why my connection isn't good enough for
these services, yet I still get and hear complaints in my household about the
internet being slow or unresponsive. I do a speedtest from said device at that
time, a mobile phone, 150 up and down. So is isn't me anymore, it is them.

------
ScottBurson
At some point bandwidth should be cheap and plentiful enough that it would be
practical, instead of gathering people into a physical office, to let them
work where they want, and do impromptu videoconferencing when they want to
talk to each other. I'm actually surprised we haven't gone farther in this
direction already. But the videoconferencing needs to be really really good,
and that is apparently still fairly expensive.

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.

~~~
bane
My company basically does this to some extent now. Group hangouts basically
fills in for conferences and we all get rMBP issued so we have web cams. Since
it's all 1:1:1:1, you can see people really well in the conference, facial
expressions, etc.

Run of the mill broadband is "good enough" for most of this.

~~~
sounds
Depends on your upload speed. How many HD webcams can you upload before your
pipe chokes?

~~~
bane
Not sure, I never had more than myself uploading. 4 or 5 downloading without
issue.

------
osmala
Speed itself is killer app. Tenth of a second is the limit to aim for
responsiveness. Now we have acceptable speed for surfing but it quite often
doesn't look like instant.

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.

------
PhasmaFelis
It's kind of weird that they seem to think they need to be maxing out whatever
bandwidth they have. The killer app for really fast internet is that you have
really fast internet.

------
eevilspock
The perfect testbed for a p2p or federated social network to supplant
Facebook. Or any other thing where we need to cut our dangerous dependencies
on Big Internet (e.g. Google, Facebook).

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.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
> Imagine a p2p social network that worked more like messaging

So, basically, email.

------
zurn
Cloud gaming. A lot of interesting things would happen if you just basically
had a video terminal and the all the computation and rendering was happening
<10 ms away.

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.

~~~
lozf
> _< 10 ms away._

This would appear to be a problem with _latency_ rather than _bandwidth._
Increasing / improving one doesn't necessarily have the same effect on the
other. This also impacts video-conferencing (as suggested above) and other
real time applications.

~~~
astrocat
This. Most people don't understand the difference between the two. You can
have all the bandwidth in the world, but if your latency is high, browsing
around the interwebs will still feel pokey.

------
bsder
Two problems: terms of service and (lack of)network effect.

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.

~~~
hayksaakian
Are peer to peer networks considered servers?

You could download a blockchain much faster.

~~~
ekimekim
Maybe. It depends on who you ask. The term "server" is pretty nebulous. That's
part of the reason I think such ToS clauses are insane - they basically give
the company a way to suspend your service for no reason if they feel like it.

------
w1ntermute
Are there any practical applications for super-fast internet that other
countries (who already have it widely available) have created? I can't think
of any off the top of my head.

------
Shorel
Virtual reality and more immersive multiplayer games.

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

------
KhalilK
_the area is finding out that Google Fiber is so fast, it’s hard to know what
to do with it._

First world problem.

~~~
tidderton
This is not Reddit. Please read the guidelines at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
KhalilK
I suggest you do.

 _If your account is less than a year old, please don 't submit comments
saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)_

