Google Fiber goes big with 20-gig plan

Maybe they should be expanding their physical network first. I waited seven years after they supposedly came to my hometown, and their coverage area barely moved. Most of that is absolutely the fault of AT&T and Comcast stonewalling pole installations but they have the money to put up their own damn poles made of gold after that 77 billion profit report.

Now I moved elsewhere after covid and of course the only two real options still suck uncontrollably with no hope of any other big mover creating actual competition.

I wouldn't want to calculate what it'd cost to replace all my switches with 25G capable ones.. then all the network cards.. You'd have to have a really specific application to justify it.

I just want an internet provider that isn't Spectrum or single-digit download speeds. Not having any real choice fucking sucks, especially since Spectrum is horrible.

Had AT&T fiber at my old place and god damn that shit went down one time for an hour the whole 3 and a half years I was there

I was involved in one of these Google fiber roll outs several years ago, Google simply doesn't know what the fuck they want or what they are doing as far as installing outside plant goes.

EDIT: To clarify, they simultaneously had no fucking clue what they were doing & also wanted to micromanage all of their contractors.

If you're struggling to think of a use-case, consider the internet-based services that are commonplace now that weren't created until infrastructure advanced to the point they were possible, if not "obvious" in retrospect.

• multimedia websites
• real-time gaming
• buffered audio -- and later video -- streaming
• real-time video calling (now even wirelessly, like Star Trek!)
• nearly every office worker suddenly working remotely at the same time

My personal hope is that abundant, bidirectional bandwidth and IPv6 adoption, along with cheap SBC appliances and free software like Nextcloud, will usher in an era where the average Joe can feel comfortable self-hosting their family's digital content, knowing they can access it from anywhere in the world and that it's safely backed up at each member's home server.

I couldn't care less tbh. Gigabit is more than enough.

I have 10 gig at home, and powerful enough networking hardware that can take advantage of it (Ubiquiti stuff)

Nothing can ever saturate the line. So it's great for aggregate, but that's it

This is still a thing? I thought they crushed it like 10 years ago

how long until google kill it?

I have their 1gbps plan, but I don't see how I could utilize anything faster.

Would be more exciting and worth paying attention to if Google Fiber wasn't basically living in an iron lung over at Alphabet these days since they halted major expansion.

I'll never understand how you guys in the US are fine with having bandwidth limits on your broadband connections. I'd be pissed. I even have unlimited on my phone. Like wth?

You could start your own VPC data center with this lmao

Why are people doubting this? This opens up massive possibilities for people, especially those who want to start businesses outside of city centers.

You could:

• host your own home-servers and never be worried about bandwidth

• get 8k streams and not stutter (a low-end 8k stream requirs 50Mb/s, a family of 4 would need minimum 200 Mb/s just for videos)

• send 8k streams and not stutter

• offload most of your data to a datacenter on the other side of the planet and not worry about access speeds

  • boot into a browser or a minimal frontend with a low powered device and mount your home directory

• offload computing to the cloud (no need for a gaming PC if you can just play them online)

The biggest thing would be 8k streams. 360 8k streams would be even crazier. 360 videos are filmed using 3-6 cameras depending on how much fish-eye you want. True 360 requires at least 6. If each is filmed at 1080p that's ~6k total resolution, but since you're only watching one section of the video at a time, you're really seeing 1080p.

Those "8k 360 videos" up on youtube are a lie! They aren't 6x8k, but most likely 8k / number of cameras. True 360 8k video would be 6x8k cameras.

A single 8k stream at minimum requires ~50Mb/s. Multiply that by 6 and you're at 300Mb/s just for a single 360 8k stream. Family of 4 --> 1.2Gb/s just for everybody to watch that content - and that's the minimum. If you have a higher bit rate and aren't streaming a 30 fps, you can quite easily double or quadruple that. Family of 4 again means 5Gb/s if everybody's watching that kind of content in parallel.

But this is just the beginning. Why stop at "video". These kinds of transfer speeds upon you up to interactive technologies.

It would still not be enough to stream 8k without any compression whatsover to reach lowest latency.

8k = 7680 × 4320 = 33,177,600 pixels. Each pixel can have 3 values: Red Green Blue. Each take 256 (0-255) values, which is 1 byte, which means 3 bytes just for color.
3 * 33,177,600 = 99,532,800 bytes per frame
99,532,800 bytes / 1,024 = 97,200 kilobytes
97,200 kilobytes / 1024 = ~95 megabytes

So 95MB/frame. Let's say you're streaming your screen with no compression at 60Hz or about 60 fps (minimum). That's 60*95MB/s = 5,695GB/s . Multiply that by 8 to get the bits and you're at 45,562Gb/s which is way above 25Gb/s. Hell, you wouldn't even be able to stream uncompressed 4k on that line. 2k would be possible though. I for one would like to see what an uncompressed 2k stream would look like. In the future, you could have your gaming PC at home hooked up to the internet, go anywhere with a 25Gb/s line, plop down a screen, connect it to the internet and control your computer at a distance with minimal lag as if you're right at home.

In conclusion, 25Gb wouldn't allow you to do whatever you like. You could do a lot, but there's still room. We're not at the end of the road yet.

I’m all about thinking ahead but this seems insane. Really struggling to think of a home use need this these speeds.

I run a relatively small server for family and friends and I haven’t moved to 2gig plan because even that seems like overkill.

Wait is fiber rollout back? …

Ew it's PON based