

Ask HN: What would you do with 1Gbps to the home? - tc

More specifically, what types of products and services would you create in a world where 100+ million homes in the US had 1Gbps internet connections?<p>Equivalently, when's the last time you've been thinking about a business idea or a product feature, and thought to yourself, "this would be great, but people don't have enough bandwidth?"<p>I talk with lots of people in telecom, and the perception is that there is no general demand for connections faster than about 10Mbps downstream, except to the extent that people want to keep up with the Jones' or get the best 'value' possible.  I always answer with the standard party line about how we can't even conceive of the type of services that will use super-fast connections until we have them.<p>But seriously.... what are we going to do with 1Gbps?<p>(Personally, I'd like to see better latency, jitter, and packet loss characteristics become widespread first.  A 1Gbps connection will still suck if there is a possibility of your packet getting caught in a buffer for 300ms.)
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swombat
1) High-res voice and video over IP.

2) Streaming HD movie rentals

3) All-services-in-the-cloud - store even my larger chunks of data (like
music, movies, etc) on a cloud service.

4) Taking this one step further, if the bandwidth really is that cheap and
plentiful (and reliable), this may obsolete the concept of having your own
media... Why bother keeping tens of gigabytes of music locally when any song
you want can be downloaded in a tenth of a second when you want to listen to
it? Why keep even more movies when you can download whatever you want
instantly?

One of the consequences of this would be to make storage a whole lot cheaper
by demolishing the demand for it. Only big cloud providers would bother buying
hard drives anymore.

5) Why not stream the entire OS experience? Turn every computer into a dumb
terminal that just displays images sent by a server that never crashes, never
has slowdowns, can scale in parallel indefinitely... could make most
applications instant. Never wait for a photoshop filter again. It would turn
the OS licensing model on its head.

6) Obsolete TV for good - with that much streaming content being that
ubiquitous, why would even TV stations bother with broadcasting on the air
waves? HD content with personalised ads for everyone.

Edit: Note that I am assuming a high-quality 1gbps link - i.e., 50ms latency
or so. Not some crazy hack with huge buffering in the ISPs that means that
while they technically deliver 1gbps, they only do so for static content
downloaded by a lot of people - I don't call that a 1gbps internet link, I
call it a TV.

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johngalt
First I'd increase my TCP window size. Otherwise I'd be latency limited :)

Being an IT Director I try to think of what I can't do without my local 1Gbps
LAN. I'd say a big one is computer re-imaging. With that type of band you
could build a good reference OS install and push it anywhere in the world that
had a similar band.

I'd also turn this around and say "how will the content providers deal with
that kind of demand?" Serving thousands of users at those speeds is a non-
trivial task. The bandwidth demanded from the server is a multiple of the
bandwidth increase to each client. If you solve this, your customers will have
big money on the table. Rather than figure out the "what" will go over those
links I'd figure out the "how".

With the current applications I'd say latency is a bigger issue. 100Mbs at
<50ms is more useful than 1Gbps at ???ms. I don't buy the idea of "dumb
terminals" AKA "web OS" without less latency. The biggest reason I use RDP,
VNC, or Citrix is to trade a bandwidth issue for a latency issue, so why would
more bandwidth == more terminal usage? If anything I'd expect the reverse.

~~~
wmf
Server performance has outstripped Internet performance for so long that I
don't think this will be a big problem. A $2,000 server can probably serve 10
Gbps from RAM... if you actually use your processor power instead of wasting
it. Throw in cheap private peering and CDNs, and you can solve the bandwidth
and latency problems at the same time.

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tdmackey
As it stands, it seems the only real demand for ultra-highspeed (40Gb/s+) is
in the data centers of the facebooks and googles of the world trying to
shuffle around all the data between their own servers. I don't think the
average home user really cares about moving around petabytes of metadata
around a network so I can't really come up with any ideas based on exisiting
needs for such speed.

Other than multiple HD streams and telepresence type stuff I am at a loss for
ideas that don't completely ignore efficiency of the traffic. Certainly, I can
saturate a 1Gbps link, but I can typically do the same with less bandwidth.
You'll probably see a lot more of consumer cloud based computing and such
assuming the latency and whatnot is also solved in the process.

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alain94040
_1) High-res voice and video over IP._

Yes. And by high-res, I want fully immersive experience: the feeling of being
there. I spend so much time on skype or on the phone talking to people
remotely: it's BAD.

 _2) Streaming HD movie rentals_

This only requires 20 Mbit/s tops. It's already available today in several
countries. I don't need 1 Gbit for that.

~~~
fragmede
_2) Streaming HD_

Given that large a pipe, I'm sure higher quality sources would start being
available, that start at 20-Mbit and only increase from there. Throw in 3D,
which for some reason is seeing a resurgence, and you easily increase the
bandwidth requirements.

Also latency. Streaming movies seem to require a large buffer such that
scrubbing back and forth on the timeline (to find where you left off of) is
cumbersome. Taking advantage of a faster link would improve that part of the
experience.

~~~
ElllisD
I'd have a room with rear-projection screens for walls. The wallpaper &
hanging pictures would change depending on who came over.

It would be used to virtually attend concert events.

There'd be some sort of virtual reality mode that scaled images to adapt and
make the corners invisible, so it could look like I'd be eating my microwave
dinner at the top of Mt. Everest, or underwater in a coral reef.

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boyter
I would do what I have always wanted to do. Write a small scale search engine
as a hobby. I have run crawlers before but always ran out of bandwidth long
before I could get any sizeable portion of the web.

Huge amounts of bandwidth would solve that issue for me.

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Locke1689
Download Real Player and turn off the buffer.

Seriously, though, if Google were to provide a static IP I would start hosting
small web projects from my house.

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pasbesoin
Real time, FULL, non-PITA offsite backup from the home office.

(Some of my artistic endeavors can generate a lot of data quickly. Upstream is
slow, and I could exceed my bandwidth cap in the course of a month.)

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dnsworks
Synchronous or Asynchronous? Honestly I don't have use for more than 10mbps or
20mbps downstream. I'd kill for 100Mbps upstream, though, so I could either
back up all of my media on a remote server, or just store all of my media on a
remote server or (sigh) "the cloud".

My camera currently generates raw photos that are 22MB in size, and if I get
shutter happy, it's not too difficult to fill up a 16GB card, especially at a
concert or a big event. Keeping my media reliably backed up is pretty
difficult, and currently involves two hard drives, one of which I bring with
me to my Seattle datacenter whenever I can. And forget about Video, I have 2TB
of high-res home video just waiting to be lost in the event of a dual spindle
crash.

The other thing would be to use some sort of telepresence service for chatting
with my daughter, who lives with her mother. All of the normal video chat
systems (skype, yahoo, google) are pathetic imitations of what popular science
promised we would have had 20 years ago.

