Again.. We need Gigi Ethernet just like phone in every house..

This is great news.. Kudos to Google for taking this initiative.. I hope it is successful and results in eye opener for US government. It has to be done.. sooner or later.. better we do it sooner and realize this potential..

It will be really interesting to watch the use cases coming out of this. Let us see, how city and its residents and hopefully young enterprising companies come up with to utilize this blazing fast internet pipe. Definitely most advantage will be in pervasive video applications and related areas. Off course Kansas City will be limited by non availability of Gigi internet on other side. But thye can definitely set up streaming services to take advantage of great upload service. Local LAN based applications will also be worth watching. With this speed, entire Kansas City should only have high def video phones or even 3D Halo type of video connectivity instead of POT (Plain Old Telephone) service.

Gaming industry should come up with more intuitive 3D type of Games where they can project other side as a Halo so you can really feel that you are playing with each other instead of playing with TV/LCD Display. I am sure, it is still early.. but once more and more Kansas Cities start coming up they will be come reality.


Cheers!!!

KANSAS CITY WIRED FOR SPEED

Google puts $70 price on ultrafast Net service

Firm installed optical fiber to create test bed for tech


By Maria Fisher and Peter Svensson

Associated Press

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Google revealed Thursday what it will charge for its long-awaited, ultrafast Internet service in Kansas City: $70 a month.

The service is intended as a showcase for what’s technically possible and as a test bed for the development of new ways to use the Internet. Bypassing the local cable and phone companies, Mountain View-based Google has spent months and an unknown amount of money pulling its own optical fiber through the two-state Kansas City region.

After vetting many contenders, Google announced last year that the Kansas City metro area would be the first to get its Fiber for Communities broadband service.

Some cities had used gimmicks to get the company’s attention. Topeka informally renamed itself “Google, Kansas.” A group in Baltimore launched a website that used Google’s mapping service to plot the location of more than 1,000 residents and give their reasons for wanting the service. Hundreds of groups on Facebook implored Google to come to their cities. The $70 monthly fee will pay for “gigabit” Internet service, about 100 times faster than a basic cable modem. For an additional $50 a month, Google will provide cable-TV-like service over the fiber, too, and a tablet computer that works as a remote. 

The channel lineup includes Nickelodeon, Discovery, Bravo, Starz and Showtime (which may require additional fees) but is missing AMC, HBO, CNN, Fox News and ESPN. Google spokeswoman Jenna Wandres wouldn’t say why the channels were missing, but said the lineup would expand. 

Google said it will start hooking up households in neighborhoods only where a sufficient number of people want service. Kansas City residents have six weeks to preregister for service, after which Google will decide which areas have enough interest. 

Google will also offer a slower Internet option, at a DSL-like 5 megabits per second, with no monthly fee to households that pay a $300 installation fee. The free service is guaranteed for at least seven years, but is available only in neighborhoods where enough people have preregistered. 

The $70 fee is more than what cable or phone companies charge for basic Internet service, but the service is also much faster. Gigabit speeds, or 1,000 megabits per second, are generally unavailable from other companies. One exception is the city-owned electric utility in Chattanooga, Tenn., which has pulled its own fiber and sells gigabit service for $350 a month. 

Kansas City, Mo., Mayor Sly James, who attended the news conference Google held in a converted yoga studio in midtown Kansas City, was clearly pleased with the announcement. 

“We now have an opportunity to take a giant step and if we don’t it’s all on us,” James said. “It’s going to be a great educational tool ... that’s going to create innovators and entrepreneurs, and that’s exactly what we want.” 

There are few ways for consumers to take advantage of gigabit speeds. For everyday activities such as Web surfing, email and video-watching, there will most likely be no substantial difference. The higher speeds will help with video sharing and online backups. 

Google is hoping that the network could help the development of other advanced applications that can take advantage of the high speeds. It’s also hoping to spur phone and cable companies into upgrading their own networks. 

“Access speeds have simply not kept pace with the phenomenal increases in computing power and storage capacity that’s spurred innovation over the last decade,” Milo Medin, Google’s vice president of Access Services, said in a blog post. 

However, it’s expensive to pull optical fiber compared with using existing phone and cable lines to provide Internet service. Verizon Communications is the only major U.S. telecommunications company to have connected homes directly to fiber. Wall Street analysts say that project, which has cost $23 billion, is not paying off. 

Verizon has stopped adding new communities to its network, dubbed FiOS. It charges $70 a month for download speeds of 15 megabits per second, less than 2 percent the speed of Google’s gigabit. 

Justin Venech, spokesman for Time Warner Cable, which provides service in Kansas City, said Thursday that he watched Google’s announcement online and said he didn’t see “too many things that jumped out at me beyond the speed.” 

“Kansas City has been competitive for video and broadband services for a long time,” Venech said. “We offer advanced products and services today and we have experienced local employees delivering local services.” 

We need Gigabit Ethernet in everyone's home

Just like telephone lines, water pipes, roads, electric cables.. We now need Gigi ethernet at everyone's home.. I think time has come for all the governments to mandate it.. start with at least new houses or developments.. Once everyone sees advantages of it and usage explodes.. it will usher us into new era of growth and all together different era when we will mock about current DSL/Cable connection the way we are mock dial-up connection or even worse, the good old Plain old Telephone (POT).. 


all these advancements in wireless have very limited application unless, pipes coming to home gets fatter and with their current diet restrictions, they need to be substantially fatter.. 


Though, 11ac will have its own application.. especially for in-home media center to multiple display device video on full HD or even super HD (with Apple's Retina display push..). It will definitely eliminate any need of any wiring in the houses which will be good relief.. 


Keep up the good work!!!


Cheers!!!

New Wi-Fi standard speeds up streaming

Protocol will provide faster coverage throughout home

By John Boudreau

jboudreau@mercurynews.com 

It wasn’t long ago families squabbled over who was hogging the TV remote control. Now they face off over who’s hogging the bandwidth.

As the number of wireless devices increases in homes — multiple TVs, smartphones, tablets, laptops — networks are getting bogged down.

But help is on the way.

A new Wi-Fi protocol — dubbed 802.11ac — will increase data speeds by as much as three times over the most recent standard to 1.3 gigabytes per second. It is also six times more power efficient and will provide faster and more reliable Wi-Fi coverage throughout the home.

Broadcom is the first wireless chip manufacturer to come out with what it is calling 5G Wi-Fi. While the new standard won’t increase the speed of data coming in through the so-called Internet pipes to the home — such as DSL or fiber-optic cables — it will enable people to view and stream video already stored on, say, PCs or DVRs, much more quickly.

“If you are paying for 50 megabytes per second from AT&T, having a 5G Wi-Fi router in your home doesn’t change that,” said Dino Bekis, Broadcom’s senior director for access and wireless entertainment. “What it does do is allow you to share content between devices — smartphones, smart TVs, etc. — much faster and more reliably than before.”

The new standard underscores the surging demand for bandwidth to handle the large amounts of video Americans are consuming every day. “Video use has been growing exponentially,” he said.

According to research by Cisco Systems, 1 million minutes of video content will race across networks every second by 2015, and the number of gadgets connected to the Internet will be twice the world’s population. Between 2010 and 2015, mobile data traffic is expected to soar 26 times.

“The need to stream multiple videos simultaneously (in homes) is there,” said Philip Solis, analyst with ABI Research. “There is a need for 802.11ac.” 

A number of manufacturers, including San Jose-based Netgear, are now rolling out routers embedded with Broadcom’s 5G Wi-Fi chips. And makers of devices, from smartphones to laptops and smart TVs, will start embedding the new chips in coming months. Taiwan computer maker Asus recently launched the first laptop equipped with the new Wi-Fi protocol. 

The new technology could add to the momentum of Americans turning away from cable TV for their entertainment, said David Henry, Netgear vice president of product management. “If folks are going to cut the cord, they need to be able to stream multiple videos at the same time,” he said. 

The new Wi-Fi standard, which operates on the wider 5 GHz radio spectrum provides more room to transfer data with less traffic, Bekis explained. “Think about it as a brand new freeway opening up with no cars,” he said. 

It’s a faster and more efficient way to move information, Bekis added. So it would be like packing a bus that can move down the highway at the speed of a Ferrari. 

In the home, that would mean the kids can watch a video in the family room, Dad can stream a movie from the DVR to his bedroom TV, and a visiting cousin could transfer a vacation video from a tablet to another TV — all simultaneously, he explained. 

Because the protocol is able to transfer data more quickly, and more efficiently, it uses significantly less power, Bekis said. “For a given amount of data, you can transmit it at one-sixth the power,” he said. 

The new protocol will make Wi-Fi signals faster and more reliable throughout the home, which usually get weaker the further one is from the router, said Netgear’s Henry. 

Routers sold with the new 5G Wi-Fi chip are expected to be compatible with devices that don’t have the new technology and operate on the more congested 2.4 GHz radio spectrum. 

“When you put this in your home, you won’t notice anything different,” Bekis said. But “as soon as you have a device that is embedded with 5G Wi-Fi, you are immediately going to be able to transmit data at these higher rates.” 

Contact John Boudreau at 408-278-3496; follow him at Twitter.com/svwriter