Doc Searls wants to know what you would do with a Gigabit fiber connection between your dwelling unit and the Internet. My answer: nothing I couldn’t do with Verizon’s standard 15 Mb/s connection. Am I missing some vital need that I have and don’t know about? Tons of bandwidth is cool until you get the bill for it, and paying for more than I need doesn’t seem all that smart to me.
For the same reason as you want a multi-core 2.5GHz CPU with gigabytes of RAM — more than a supercomputer of a decade ago. You’ll want to waste it 99.9% of the time, but 0.1% of the time the technology will be asked to match the processing speed of the human brain, and then it looks really slow. So I’ll want to share that 20Mb Powerpoint deck, and the 10+ second wait on your network will interrupt our flow. Just like you don’t “need” HDTV, wideband audio, etc., you don’t “need” gigabit fibre. But it’ll make a perceptible difference to the user experience, and at the right price that’s worth having.
As you note, we’re several tech cycles from that price point. User controlled lightpaths and cut out the silicon?
The one thing I’d be able to do with a gigabit to my home is use the file servers at work as if they were local. And I’d be able to have a few videoconferences going and all the ordinary stuff. So making location immaterial would be the main driving app, and that’s not an unreasonable goal.
Technology-wise it certainly is interesting. We’d have to dust off the Pluris router and make it faster.