MunicipalFiber.com

One of the questions that comes up when people hear about the super-fast internet speeds provided by the Google Fiber service is “What can I do with it that I couldn’t before?”. The first one is cloud-storage.

It wasn’t too long ago that storing your documents somewhere apart from your own computer wasn’t the best idea, mainly because your internet connection wasn’t nearly fast enough to push or pull video, entire photo albums, or music to and from the internet every day. Google Fiber (depending on the plan you get) comes with a ton of online storage, more than many laptops have and certainly much more than you get on your tablet or phone. More importantly, the speed is just as fast or faster than the average home network so sending a file to someone over the internet could be just as fast as the computer next to you. While cloud storage was certainly possible before, the dramatically improved internet speeds make it way more practical.

I’ve also been thinking about what that means for things like video calls and streaming. My existing internet connection from the last few years already has speeds fast enough for video conferencing. Google Fiber raises the standard: You could now have everyone in the house on different video calls without disrupting normal browsing or downloads. It has bandwidth to spare, instead of just enough to pull it off. Many websites won’t even be able to send as fast as you can receive, meaning it won’t slow your browsing down just because someone in the other room is watching youtube in HD. Perhaps more importantly, your youtube video shouldn’t have to get stuck buffering right in the middle.

So what else? It’s clear that this is going to be some seriously fast internet, but what are the benefits apart from just doing everything faster? The best part is that the next generation of technology is going to leverage faster speeds. My phone is already trying to automatically upload my pictures to my dropbox, facebook, or google plus account. When 1080p is old-school and everything is running in 4k (the next-generation of HD), you won’t have to upgrade your connection. The world already wants to use all the bandwidth you have, and getting Google Fiber should give you plenty of opportunity to let it.

Tags: cloud, google fiber