Google Fibe Real World Review Upload Spees
What Practise You Practise With the World'due south Fastest Net Service?
I visited Google'due south airplane pilot plan in Kansas Urban center, Kan., to find out.
Courtesy of Google
One afternoon in January, I went to visit some Google employees who'd offered to show me one of the company's latest and greatest innovations. This isn't unusual: I live about ten minutes from Google'due south headquarters, and I regularly terminate past its campus to see its absurd new stuff. This fourth dimension, though, my trip involved two flights, a lengthy layover, and a suspicious wife: "Why practice you demand to get to Kansas Urban center to write about Google?"
Information technology was a good question. In March of 2010, Google announced its intention to build super-fast fiber-optic Internet service in "a modest number of trial locations across the United States." A yr later, after receiving more than 1,000 applications from cities and towns across the state, Google chose Kansas City as its commencement location. Last November, Google began installing service in people'south homes. For $70 a month, the company offers Kansas City residents a 1-gigabit Internet line—the fastest home Internet service available anywhere in the world, about 150 times faster than the average American broadband speed of half-dozen.7 Mbps. (You besides go 1 terabyte of online storage as part of the deal, something Google usually sells for $50 a month.) For $120 a calendar month, you get the one-Gb line plus cable-like Television service, besides every bit a Nexus 7 tablet that you can apply as your remote. There'south also a "costless" plan: After you pay a $300 construction fee—which you tin split into 12 payments of $25—Google will provide your home with a 5-Mbps Internet line for "at least seven years," and probably indefinitely. (Legally, the company needed to provide an end date for service.)
These are amazing services at unbelievable prices. For almost the same fee that many Americans currently pay for cable, Google is offering Internet speeds that, until now, were available but to big companies for thousands of dollars a month.
Therein lies the mystery. Google's gigabit initiative, called Google Fiber, has sparked a circular of questions across the tech industry. Is Google looking to become an Isp? Does it only want to spur other ISPs into providing faster service? And why wire Kansas Metropolis rather than, say, Silicon Valley or New York? And, finally, why gigabit Internet—what does Google look people to do with the world's fastest broadband service?
In this piece, I'll focus on the final two questions: What has it been like for the people of Kansas Urban center to live and work with the world's fastest Internet? In my next column, I'll examine Google's strategic interests in Fiber—why is the search company edifice its own Internet lines?
Ane of the beginning places I visited in Kansas City was the Fiber Space, a lavish exhibit that Google built to bear witness what's possible with a i-Gb Net line. (The infinite is on Land Line Road, which divides the Missouri and Kansas sides of Kansas City; concluding twelvemonth Google began deploying Fiber on the Kansas side, only this twelvemonth it volition launch service to houses on the Missouri side, too.)* The Cobweb Space is an odd place—an effort to render visible and fun something that you tin't really run across. It looks a bit like a futuristic Ikea, with TVs, laptops, and tablet computers tastefully arranged in several stylishly decorated mock living rooms. (If, equally rumored, Google is thinking about building retail stores of its own, I bet they'll await like the Fiber Space.)
At Cobweb Space, I sat beside Carlos Casas, 1 of the company's community outreach managers, on a burrow in front of a large TV connected to a laptop. To testify that we were connected to a real Fiber line, i of Casas' assistants loaded up Google Cobweb's speed test page. A few seconds later, nosotros saw the astounding results: The computer was getting 938.24 Mbps download speeds, and uploads were at 911.67 Mbps. Past comparison, my AT&T U-Verse home Internet line—which costs me most $60 a month, merely slightly less than Google Fiber'south one-Gb program—gets downloads of about 22 Mbps and uploads of 3 Mbps. Google'due south download speeds are 42 times faster than mine and its uploads are 303 times faster. When I saw those numbers, I had to stifle a few tears.
Casas' assistant pulled up a high-definition video on YouTube. It started playing immediately. Then he opened another browser tab and launched another 1080p video. Then another and some other and another—he kept going until he had five videos playing simultaneously. (He'd muted the sound.) Adjacent he clicked on each tab and fast-forwarded each video to a random spot in the middle. They started playing from that spot instantly, with none of them sputtering or slowing in whatever manner. "I detest racing that trivial gray bar when I'grand watching videos on YouTube," Casas said. "You're always similar, 'Oh, it's going to take hold of up, it's going to take hold of up!' With this, it'due south never going to grab up. Your video isn't going to stop playing."
To be sure, this was pretty cool. And yet it wasn't mind-blowing. Indeed, it felt a fiddling underwhelming. After all, who needs to play five Hd videos at the same fourth dimension? If that'southward Google's all-time demo of its superfast service, what does it propose about what regular people will do with it? What's more than, the demo didn't even brainstorm to approach the limits of Google Cobweb—with five Hd videos playing simultaneously there were yet hundreds of megabits left on the pipage. When I got back dwelling a few days later, I replicated the same test on my home broadband line and experienced only a few hiccups.
And this gets to the key problem with Google Fiber: It's totally awesome, and totally unnecessary. During my time in Kansas City, I spoke to several local businesspeople, aspiring startup founders, and a few city boosters. They were all thrilled that Google had come to town, and the few who'd gotten access to the Google pipe said they actually loved information technology. But I couldn't find a single person who'd found a way to apply Google Fiber to anywhere near its potential—or even a one-half or quarter of what information technology can do. It was even hard to detect people who could fully utilize Google Fiber in their imaginations. As hard as people tried, few could even think up ways to practice something truly astonishing with the world'southward fastest Cyberspace.
Courtesy of Google
This was true fifty-fifty of Google employees, both the folks on the ground in Kansas City and the execs who are managing Google Fiber from Mountain View, Calif. "What can you do with Google Cobweb?" I'd ask, and I'd ofttimes get an answer like, "Anything yous want." Technically, this is true. It's besides singularly unhelpful. During my fourth dimension in Kansas, when I finally got some free time with a motorcar connected to Google Fiber, I couldn't find any better answers for what I should do with it. My showtime instinct was to try out all the things that strain today's Internet lines—I loaded upward a lot of Web pages, I tried to stream lots of videos, and I even attempted to illegally download some movies. Those things worked perfectly well. And then I didn't know what else to exercise. I had finally found the broadband nirvana I'd e'er dreamed about. So why was I and so bored?
The disability to anticipate the utility of Google Cobweb is understandable. Thomas Watson, the legendary IBM CEO, is often quoted as having said, in 1943, "I think there is a world market place for mayhap five computers." Similarly there's a story that Beak Gates once declared that "640k is more retention that anyone will always demand." These are both misquotes, but they each go at the mode today's technological needs tin blind us to tomorrow'due south possibilities. After all, information technology was truthful that, in the 1940s, about people didn't need a computer. In order for u.s. to become to a time when computers could be personal machines, we had to enter a cycle in which computers would gradually offering more and more utility, creating wider need, which would in turn prompt more uses for PCs, then on and and so forth until we all had Windows.
Gigabit broadband is like that. For it to become truly useful and necessary, nosotros'll need to encounter a long-term feedback loop of utility and acceptance. First, super-fast lines must permit us to do things that nosotros can't do with the pedestrian Net. This volition prompt more people to demand gigabit lines, which volition in plough invite developers to create more than apps that require high speed, and and then on. What I discovered in Kansas Urban center is that this bike has non yet begun. Or, every bit Ars Technica put information technology recently, "The rest of the Internet is too slow for Google Cobweb."
But I also saw modest signs that people are beginning to think virtually means to get this bicycle rolling. Unbeknownst to virtually techies in Silicon Valley, Kansas City has a thriving startup scene, and a few local entrepreneurs have been trying to attract smart people to the urban center to make use of Google Fiber. Ben Barreth, a Web developer, recently purchased a modest house in one of the first neighborhoods to be wired with Fiber. He calls it the "Home for Hackers," and he'south letting smart techie types from outside the city live in the house rent-free for 3 months.
I spent a 24-hour interval at the Hacker Domicile talking to two of its electric current residents. I of them, Synthia Payne, is a middle-aged singer who's working on a visitor called Cyberjammer, which would let musicians in dissimilar parts of the earth jam together alive, in real time. The other resident, Nick Budidharma, is a gamer who just graduated from high schoolhouse and is starting a multiplayer game hosting service. Both of their firms require fast Cyberspace, though hardly gigabit speeds. Still, they said that after living with Fiber, extra-speedy broadband had get integrated into their lives.
For instance, both Payne and Budidharma find themselves relying more on cloud-based services like Dropbox to shop their files. Budidharma says that he doesn't spend as much time thinking well-nigh which pictures to upload to Facebook, as there's about no upload delay—"I just throw them all up there." He'due south also noticed a huge comeback in multiplayer games. In the first-person shooter Counter-Strike, "at that place's a thing called peeker'southward advantage—if you speedily peek effectually a corner that someone else is already looking down, the person with the better latency volition see the other person first," Budidharma says. With Google Fiber, that "can exist close to a i-2d advantage—I can see people a trivial faster than they can see me. And I've noticed that I've been consistently scoring five or 10 kills higher than I normally exercise."
Another company that's looking to make utilise of Google Fiber is SightDeck, a business firm started past a couple Hollywood effects gurus that'due south working on a product to allow people in dissimilar parts of the world to meet in a single, virtual workplace. It works like this: I stood in front end of a project screen in Kansas City, while a SightDeck employee stood in front of a similar screen in Los Angeles. Two cameras connected to high-speed Internet lines were aimed at each of us. And then, Clynt Wynn, SightDeck's user experience lead, turned the system on. At present the remote employee was projected on the screen next to me, and I was projected on the screen next to him. What's more, superimposed on the screen behind u.s.a. was an image of Google World. When either of the states reached out to touch the screen, we could interact with the planet—when we swiped the screen, the Google Earth image would scroll or zoom. (Here's a video demo of the system.)
SightDeck, and then, is something like a life-size video phone call with no lag. It was pretty cool, merely in truth even this didn't brand total use of Google Fiber's ability. Indeed, after the demonstration, Wynn pointed out that the edifice where SightDeck'due south role is located does not yet accept admission to Google Fiber. The demo I saw was running on a conventional high-speed commercial broadband line. SightDeck would be fifty-fifty ameliorate with Fiber, but it certainly didn't demand a gigabit to function.
By the end of my fourth dimension in Kansas, I'd thus resigned myself to never seeing the full potential of Google Cobweb. My adjacent stop would exist Mountain View, where I'd try to figure out if Google knows what to do with it.
Update, March 12, 2013, seven p.chiliad.: This sentence was added mail-publication to analyze the scope of the Google Cobweb project. (Return.)
Correction, March 12, 2013: Due to a production error, the caption for the Google Cobweb Infinite showroom photo incorrectly identified the location of the showroom in Kansas Metropolis, Kan. It is in Kansas City, Mo.
Source: https://slate.com/technology/2013/03/google-fiber-review-nobody-knows-what-to-do-with-the-worlds-fastest-internet-service.html
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