Google Fiber, Why It's So Awesome!

  This is one of the projects at Google that I am super excited about.  It's one of those initiatives that I believe can not only change the way people use the internet, but also change the way traditional companies do business.  It will push people to do better, faster.  I really think this has the potential to impact the world in much the same way that search had.  Why?  A few simple reasons:

Lightning Speed
Google Fiber will be delivering 1Gb upload and download speeds.  This means everything instantly becomes faster.  It means you can download pretty much anything, in seconds.  It means you can play literally any game without any lag.  It means you can stream movies and content immediately.  It means you can record multiple television shows at once.  It means better viewing through less compression.  It means storing everything you own in the cloud and accessing it easily.  Everything you now do on the internet will become instantly faster.  No lag.  Less downtime.  Period.

Freebies

• You get a DVR with 2Tb of storage
• You get a nice new flashy Galaxy Nexus 7 tablet

Most Importantly, the Shackles of Content Providers are Broken
You are no longer are at the whim of the giant, entrenched data providers who purposefully lock down, limit, and unreasonably "protect" their pipes.  You no longer are forced to abide by unfair practices or pay unfair fees for services, just because they want to or need to meet quarterly growth targets.  You now have a choice.  The choice to be free.  These companies will be forced to change the way they do business.  To compete fairly and openly. 

I don't know about you, but when I was a Comcast subscriber, my search pages were always hijacked by their crappy search experience.  I was sick of them forcing me to download applications that sat on my desktop, monitoring my every move.  Or maybe it was their unfair pricing tactics, their crappy customer service, or the fact that I had to bundle Nickelodeon for kids when I haven't watched that channel in 30 years.  The list just goes on and on.  I'm ready for a change.  I detailed my last fiasco here.
To be fair, it's not just Comcast.  It's almost every other ISP out there sucks just as much. 

The Future With Google Fiber
In the future, I envision a 24/7 connection to the home with instant access anywhere on the planet.  Sure this opens up some big old security holes.  But it's also another business opportunity.  Forget a document at home?  No worries.  Forget to turn off some lights.  No worries.  Forget to check what you needed at home from the grocery store?  Check.  The power of this service really comes in passing large amounts of data back and forth between the home.    This creates the ability for applications ever increasing in size.

Imagine medical applications you could use at home - with all of the processing and hardware in the cloud?  Or any scientific tool really.  Anything encapsulated in data can now be available on a Google Fiber endpoint.

Just think about how much time would be saved?  Even if the time saved is minor per person, imagine the overall time save on a global scale!

Now let's be conservative.  There are ~6,000,000 broadband internet subscriptions in the world today.  Say each of these connections saves about 1 minute / week per connection (in aggregate, because multiple people use a connection).  And these all turned into 100Gb tubes.  I still think this is conservative.  But down the road it's feasible to save hundreds of thousands of people days / year.  Even millions.

52 * 6,000,000 = 312,000,000 minutes per year
312,000,000 = 5,120,000 hours / year
That's about 213,333 days we save.  That's not bad Google.