Come on Baby Light my Fiber!

The Google Fiber sensation is sweeping the nation, city after city is jumping in trying to get their community’s broadband speeds up to a legendary 1 Gigabit per Second (gbps). First, for a second, lets look at just how fast 1gbps actually is. If your internet speed down (meaning for downloading) is 1gbps, you are downloading at a rate of 1,000 Megabytes per Second (mbps). Most MP3 files are between 5 and 10 MB in size, that means that an mp3 download would take you 1/200th to 1/100th of a second to download, an 800MB movie would take you 1/8th of a second to download. Well thats all well and good, but whats really the big deal? Mp3s don’t take that long to download right now as is, and movie’s are all streamed (unless you are downloading illegally, which you shouldn’t be) so you can watch and download at the same time and you don’t really notice the file size, the thing is though, this comes in real handy for really large files.

I went to download the FreeBSD 8.0 image the other day which weighs in at about 1.75GB, the download took quite a long time on my 300kbps (Killabytes per Second) download speed, several hours infact. Had I had a 1gbps broadband connection the download would have taken less than 4 seconds! That is absolutely incredible. Now its easy to understand why people are getting so excited over this. Currently Topeka, KS, Greenville, SC, Sarasota, FL, Baltimore, MD, Austin, TX, Charlottesville, VA, Greensboro, NC, Portland, OR, Grand Rapids, MI, Indianapolis, IN, Ventura, CA, Columbia, MO, Davis, CA, Huntsville, AL, Buffalo, NY, Baton Rouge, LA, Rochester, NY, Fresno, CA, Cincinnati, OH, and San Luis Obispo, CA have expressed interest in the Google Fiber project, just to name a few. I know I would love if Google picked my town for their experiment, 300kbps really sucks sometimes for a power-user like me, I like to consume a lot of bandwidth fast. Is your city trying their hand at woo-ing Google? How do you think google is going to base their decision?  Let me know in the comments.