This week, residents in the two Kansas cities will be able to arrange for installation of Google's new 1 Gbps fiber optic internet service.
Residents of the two Kansas cities are now among the first to experience Google's fairly revolutionary new Internet service. The fiber optic service, first announced in 2010, will be among the fastest available anywhere in the United States, and delivers 1 Gbps Internet service – a speed 100 times faster than that of an average American's Internet connection.
This week, it will become possible for residents to arrange for installations of this new connection into their homes, so they can access content at the speed of light – literally, in a sense. The fiber optic cables that are being used in Google's new service carry data signals by light beams transmitted through a glass thread inside the cables. These light beams are ideal for data, since they can deliver vastly superior transfer speeds, orders of magnitude greater than that of the every day Joe.
For an idea of how fast this kind of Internet is, at a speed of 1 Gbps, it's theoretically possible to zip a four gigabyte HD movie to a connected computer in about thirty seconds.
Of course, this is in perfectly ideal conditions. And, needless to say, there probably aren't a lot of servers on the web ready to capacitate a steady a lot of traffic at those rates.
But now that the Google monster is adding ISP to its already towering resume of services, the average netizen can be sure that an Internet revolution won't be far behind.
Source: Engadget