While others across the industry battle it out over 10-gig claims, Google Fiber is looking to go bigger, plotting the rollout of a symmetrical 20-gig service for select residential and business cus | The service will use Nokia's 25G-PON gear and initially be available later this year as an invite-only product.
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.
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.
Video calls were all over 1950s futurism articles. These things do get anticipated far ahead of time.
4K Blu-ray discs have a maximum bitrate of 128 Mbps. Most streaming services compress more heavily than that; they’re closer to 30 to 50 Mbps. A 1Gbps feed can easily handle several people streaming 4K video on the same connection provided there’s some quality of service guarantees.
If other tech were there, we could likely stream a fully immersive live VR environment to nearly holodeck-level realism on 1Gbps.
IPv6 is the real blocker. As you say, self-hosting is what could really bring bandwidth usage up. I think some kind of distributed system (something like BitTorrent) is more likely than files hosted on one specific server, at least for publicly available files.