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Google Fiber

Sin_Chase said:
Probably about right. Internet connectivity on a whole in the US is not as great as one might expect.
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I was thinking 10mbps was way to high as an average, seeing as the us is huge, I mean just look at there mobile phone network coverage. Aren't we in the Uk only on about 8mbps and we're all packed in tightly. Higher than I expected 5.8mbps for q4 2011.

So it's way faster than 100x


Edit - oh wow uk is only 4.9mbps and actually dropping along with most other countries.

Only Sweden and Finland managed to up their speeds out of the European countries.
 
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EdGey said:
Lol, I like my 2MB connection.

Browsing and gaming wouldn't feel the same without it.
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Gaming will benefit from the increased speed rather than the capacity, it's the ping that's important with gaming not so much the size of the pipe.

Fibre operates at the speed of light and will potentially eliminate the need to play on local servers to avoid lag.
 
Even though it's FTTH there will still be some latency involved because the end user equipment isn't all fibre based. Latency will be low of course but then again existing cable lines have low latency as well (<>10ms on Virgin Media, for example).
 
mrk said:
Even though it's FTTH there will still be some latency involved because the end user equipment isn't all fibre based. Latency will be low of course but then again existing cable lines have low latency as well (<>10ms on Virgin Media, for example).
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Yeah but once you have FTTH the user is then in control of that last bit. With FTTC you can't do anything to improve your connection further.

Also the latency difference between fibre and cable over a few metres from your PC to the wall would be so ridiculously small the human brain simply would never notice it (fractions of nano seconds). Over a few hundred metres though like with FTTC and we can start talking in milliseconds.
 
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estebanrey said:
Yeah but once you have FTTH the user is then in control of that last bit. With FTTC you can't do anything to improve your connection further.

Also the latency difference between fibre and cable over a few metres from your PC to the wall would be so ridiculously small the human brain simply would never notice it (fractions of nano seconds). Over a few hundred metres though like with FTTC and we can start talking in milliseconds.
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Thought this was a tech forum for the technically aware... :confused:
 
estebanrey said:
Not sure if serious or sarcasm.
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You misunderstood, both light and electrical signals travel at the speed of light. The difference of course is that copper cables need repeaters and other equipment which causes delays. the distance they can transmit is also significantly shorter.

So is fiber faster? Yes if you're talking about bandwidth and real world applications.
Is light faster than electricity? Same speed. Fiber is not faster.
 
firstborn said:
Thought this was a tech forum for the technically aware... :confused:
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Instead of just making a sarky comment and running away, how about you point out exactly what you disagree with post. Who knows you might teach me something.

alexthecheese said:
I thought electricity travelled at the speed of light, ish? :confused:
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Only under certain circumstances, the copper cables we currently use are probably limited to around 60-70% the speed of light.


Veco said:
Is light faster than electricity? Same speed. Fiber is not faster.
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Electricity is only as fast as light in a perfect vacuum, seeing as it's currently impossible to delivery it in that fashion it's not worth talking about. The fact is fibre optic cable using light is faster (latency) than copper cable using electricity.
 
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Speed of light is always going to be faster than an electrical connection.

"while in a typical coaxial cable it is about 66% of the speed of light"

Thats what people on virgin get though.
 
Veco said:
Thanks for ignoring the sentence before that says fibers faster in real world applications.
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Like how you ignored the context in what I was saying before. The poster I was replying thought that fibre operated at the same speed as "an electrical signal down a copper wire" (i.e a real world application) which it isn't, the fibre is quicker. However you then replied saying I'd misunderstood whilst backing up that claim afterall.
 
Let's not get too handbags on this. :p I genuinely thought there would be little or no difference whatsoever, so fair play if it's actually significant.

Looking at that Google page and their TV, storage box, gigabit internet, Chromebook - their whole solution, it looks pretty mad really. I would be all over that. The ability to record 8 channels at once did make me laugh. :D
 
estebanrey said:
Gaming will benefit from the increased speed rather than the capacity, it's the ping that's important with gaming not so much the size of the pipe.

Fibre operates at the speed of light and will potentially eliminate the need to play on local servers to avoid lag.
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Please, you're arguing the difference between 197,000,000m/s - 200,000,000, which if I worked it out correct is the difference between 4.77ms - 5ms ping per 1000km one way. Give or take "numbers".

Of course, that's as the crow flies with no interuption or hops and a one way trip, when it comes to gaming/latency it's what goes from your house, to the server and back again with everything in between, though I don't need to tell you tha. Data travels only at the speed of light through that medium, it will not "eliminate" the need to play on servers close to you.

However I've only been able to real world test that 3/4 times it's enough to say it's not going to mean a damn and if you suddenly had a massive improvement there was something wrong with your original set up/routing.
That's not even going into how many games do or do not work well playing from/to different continents, some do, some don't, but that's just me be cautious in case someone decides to fit that in like I don't know already.

I think a lot of people don't realise that when you're already on a decent enough connection having more bandwidth doesn't mean faster ping(or insanely faster), way back when we were on dialup and isdn(ish) sure, but that's due to limitations in other areas, noise, packetloss up the wazoo and... yeah. Today for most of us? no.

Saying "Fibre operates at the speed of light and will potentially eliminate the need to play on local servers to avoid lag." just sounds sensationalist.
This is brought up a lot in discussion about OnLive, people saying in the future the delay issues will get better, you can't break the laws of physics (yet). so the only option there is, as you said in opposite, local/closer content servers.
 
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Yeah I remember when I first got cable with Cable & Wireless. It was 120Kbps and gave me 15-20~ pings in CS.

That latency is no different today though and that's on 100Mb.
 
Offering free Internet services to educational establishments and hospitals in the local 'fiberhoods' will really encourage some users to buy Google Fiber, in my opinion.
 
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