The City Wire Special Report: Seeking Google’s Fiber — Part III
by February 25, 2010 2:34 pm 79 views
Editor’s note: This is the third in a four-part series attempting to explain what Google’s plan to build an ultra-high speed Internet connection could mean for the Fort Smith/Van Buren area. The series will wrap up Friday (Feb. 26). The fourth article will list a few reasons why municipalities or local organizations in this region should send Google an application.
story by Tom Kirkham, president of Kirkham Systems and publisher of The City Wire
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Anything that can be digitized will be delivered over the Internet. Frequent listeners to my radio show have heard this for some time now. But what does this mean?
It means that ALL forms of communication will be delivered over the Internet. Newspapers? We’ve been watching this for decades now. Radio? Stream KWHN on your computer or iPhone. Television and movies? How about Netflix On Demand or iTunes. All of this news and entertainment is available by just streaming or downloading from the Internet. Indeed, thanks to the massive amounts of free time we enjoy in developed countries, entertainment is the chief driving force behind broadband deployment.
And we are not talking just human communication. We quickly moving into the Internet of Things, where your car, refrigerator, air conditioner, and practically all other devices will be using the Internet to communicate with manufacturers and each other. All of this requires more bandwidth.
Today, we enjoy broadband Internet speeds. It is adequate for most people’s needs, and it is gradually improving in speed. If you subscribe to your ISPs fastest offerings, (in our area, it is 25Mbps) you can download a high definition movie in 32 minutes or so. Ultra high speed Internet will do that in 6 minutes. Googles Fiber for Communities will do it in 39 seconds. That’s a bunch of pipe.
• Hey, You, Get Onto My Cloud
Besides high definition movies, what good is it, though? “Cloud” computing is one of the benefits. Using your Internet browser, you “run” the application remotely on a server somewhere in the “cloud.” A good example of this is Google Docs. Google Docs allow you to do word processing, spreadsheets and build presentations without installing software on your computer. And since your computer does not need a robust processor, memory or even storage for the documents and applications, you can use cheaper computers, but they will last much longer as well. However, even with broadband speeds, it still feels slow compared to natively installed applications.
• Beam Me Up, Scotty
Telepresence is one of the big things. According to Wikipedia, Telepresence refers to a set of technologies which allow a person to feel as if they were present at a location other than their true location. You may think that this mean videoconferencing, but telepresence is a much deeper and immersive audio and video experience, like say, the Holodeck from Star Trek. It also requires a lot more bandwidth than what most people have access to.
With telepresence, education, community meetings, business engagements and other forms of interactivity can be experienced without the need for travel, and the subsequent waste of time and natural resources such as fuel. Even better, the access to instant and expert knowledge can save lives, even going so far as having physicians performing remote surgery. Educationally, imagine school children in rural towns being able to explore undersea coral reefs in real-time. Imagine how many Cousteaus that could produce.
• What We Don’t Know
Even more importantly, ultra-high speed Internet will provide opportunities for the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs to build something no one has thought of. Each advancement in technology has produced new “killer apps” and services that has taken advantage of faster speeds or cheaper storage. Ultra High Speed Internet access is a fundamental communication change that will create opportunities that we simply can’t foresee.
What we do know is that faster Internet is better for everyone.