http://www.13wham.com/news/local/story/Ontario-County-Pushes-for-Ultra-Fast-Google/sGwKwwCqWUyzAqnsVTNVQQ.cspx

Also if another city gets selected, I wonder how many people would want to move to that city, just for the 1gigabit Internet connection.

There are so many things one could do with that kind of connection. Friends that you have on the same network would basically be on your “LAN”, speed wise. Imagine, sharing HD video between households, distributed Media Center HD recordings (enabling sharing TV tuner resources, to avoid duplication), offsite backups made just as fast as local network. The possbilities are endless.

This is sort of the Holy Grail of Internet (currently).

blarg now I feel ill…

The bottleneck is like you mentioned, your storage medium speed. Having a fast drive will help a lot, RAM drive or a good SSD.

A couple of guys with 1Gb connections posted their download speed off of their Usenet provider. The original poster got 356.1 Mbps/44.5 MBps with a RAM drive and another got 377Mb. This is with 256 SSL on, which adds a little overhead, and there are probably slight limitations with Newsbin at those speeds as one of the developers pointed out.

http://forums.newsbin.com/viewtopic.php?t=25516&highlight=

Basically, if you have a drive that can handle 125MB/s theoretical sustained rate, you can download at 1Gb/sec, keyword here is sustained. There are some SSD’s that can do that.

We can only dream right?

And I hate to tell her, that if Americans had that kind of speed, they would use it. To blatantly say, “…most users in Rochester don’t need ultra-fast Internet access”, is showing lack of foresight. Has she not seen the increase of broadband speeds over the years, especially in the past 5 years? And the new services being offered due to those increased broadband speeds? The Internet will grow and innovate even more with increased speeds.

Anyway, I would really hope that Google picks my area but compared to the rest of the nation, the odds of having my area picked out of the whole is very slim.

——

A Frontier spokeswoman Thursday said Google has a poor track record of following through on such proposals and that creating a fiber-optic network from scratch would be enormously expensive. However, she said, Frontier would be willing to talk about leasing space on its existing network.

“If Google built its own network, we estimate it would cost $5,000 per household,” said Ann Burr, chairman and general manager of Frontier Communications of Rochester.
She said most users in Rochester don’t need ultra-fast Internet access.

——

My quesiton is if Frontier has the space on it’s network to lease for 1Gbps operation, why do they insist on a 5Meg cap?

While most Rochestarians don’t “need” ultra-fast broadband, they may want it. And tomorrow, they just may need it.

Forget wireless though. N can’t go past 250-300Mbps on the downstream due to duplexing unless you have multiple radios and an expensive PCI-E adapter.

If interested, the phone interview would take just a few minutes. Please send me e-mail by 3:30pm ET if interested and include a phone number where you can be reached to:

phil @ stopthecap.com

I’m not sure how valuable consumer-volunteered data would be. I suspect most will be seeking to downplay their local speeds in order to make a Google fiber project look more useful for their communities.

I still think one of the major reasons for this project is to obtain another tool in their arsenal for the public policy debate over Net Neutrality and broadband service in general.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/think-big-with-gig-our-experimental.html

I also reached out to David Mayor and 13wham.

Will be curious how much info that Google will share, after the RFI deadline, on how many responses that they had.

If we wait around for commercial providers to do it, it will be a long wait, precisely the same way many Americans had to wait for electricity and phone service.

It will be expensive and a major investment, and take years and years to complete, but frankly it seems like a better way to spend taxpayer money than giving it to Bank of America and Goldman Sachs.

Then Google can laugh the next time the Cable Co’s or AT&T makes noise about wanting to charge access fees for carrying google traffic and they come up with 4x the fees for providing transit to the last mile.