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Google Fiber Launches In Provo — and Here's What It Feels Like
Velcroman1 writes "I've seen the future. It's called gigabit Internet by Google Fiber, and it just launched in my hometown of Provo, Utah, the second of three scheduled cities to get speeds that are 100 times faster than the rest of America. 'What good is really fast Internet if the content stays the same?' you may ask yourself. I certainly did, before testing the service. Besides, my "high speed" Internet from Comcast seemed fast enough, enabling my household to stream HD videos, load web pages quickly, and connect multiple devices as needed, largely without hiccup. I was wrong. Using gigabit Internet, even in its infancy, opened my eyes to speed and reminded me of why I love the Internet."
What was your throughput like? If they're providing GigE, you still won't see it on a single workstation. Did you measure the uplink speed?
What was your latency like? You could have GigE, but if it's 1000ms pings, that's going to be worthless for most of this audience.
Where are they peering? What did your traceroutes look like?
There are lots of ways we can quantify how good or bad a connection is. You missed the important parts.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
All that symmetrical bandwidth + restrictions against running servers. Woot! http://worldofends.com/
... I was a researcher in a very advance research facility. At that time we had a (supposedly) "big pipe" to the Net, a 100Mbps line. (That was several decades ago)
I was feeling kinda "proud" that I get to "play" with the "high speed link" to the world, that I, somehow, is on a higher pedestal than the rest of the peons ... until I visited South Korea.
In a friend's home, yes, private house, I experienced for the first time, what raw speed meant.
The 1Gbps speed just blew my fucking mind away, and imagine, they got that in their home, and I, a researcher, only get to play a supposedly "big 100Mbps pipe".
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I've been perusing the Google Fiber site trying to understand how it works. Is Google going to be the ISP? Are they just working with local ISPs to implement some of this?
And if I get Google fiber who is in charge of making sure I can't get all the content of the web at equal speeds?
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Even when I use the gigabit connection at work, I don't notice a huge difference between that and the 50mbit connection at home unless I'm doing a big download (but even so, I rarely get gigabit speeds unless I'm connecting to one of the servers on the other end of our gigabit pipe -- the internet and server on the other end tend to limit the speed).
Pages don't seem to load any faster (which I assume is due to rendering time and time to wait on slow ad networks to spit out their javascript to let the page finish loading), and videos don't seem to load any faster, since the time to buffer enough of the video to start playing isn't that significant, even at a paltry 50mbit).
And this quote:
Then try panning to another area of the painting. It drags, doesn’t it? It may even slow your browser across other tabs—it did on mine.
So somehow downloading data faster means that your browser won't slow down over multiple tabs? I'm on a 10mbit connection now, and my browser pans smoothly, but I have to wait a second or two for the hi-res image to load.
I'd be happy to have gigabit at home if it were affordable, but I don't see it being a miraculous change. And I bet a lot of people wouldn't notice any difference at all between a 10mbit broadband connection and a 1000mbit connection.
as a website maker (I hesitate to use the term developer on slashdot since javascript and php get a lot of hate), I load tons of pages from my own computer -- both my own coded pages and prepackaged stuff like Prestashop ecommerce software and Joomla. And loading pages from localhost is even faster than Google Gigabit fiber internet.
And guess what, it's nice but not life-changing. For example, doing ecommerce admin on a live customer website on the internet via DSL, vs. doing the same thing on my test localhost site. It's faster and less laggy but nothing I would kill for.
The difference between dialup internet and decent cable/DSL was way bigger.
You don't own a Google Fiber modem yet!? You HAVE seen the speeds right? Only Google Fiber has the gigabit speeds I require for BLAST PROCESSING! Google does what Comcan't!
Chattanooga has symmetric 1gbps internet available to the entire city and suburbs for the same price as google fiber (but no "zero-cost" option for low speed). And, as a plus, it isn't google, it is the local electricity co-op.
https://epbfi.com/internet/
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Funny you should mention Net Neutrality, because this is what it's all about. And an example of how farsighted Google is compared to their opposition, always a step ahead in their strategic planning. If Net Neutrality continues to get rolled back, expect Internet companies to get squeezed hard by the big ISPs (I predict Netflix will be the most vulnerable example of this). "Nice Market you got there. Would be a shame if anything happened to it."
Google is anticipating such a development, and demonstrating to those providers that they are not quite untouchable as they think. They don't need to roll out Google Fiber everywhere (though that would be awesome), just do it enough times to demonstrate to ISPs that they can do it anywhere.
Is there a special Olympics for underestimating one's needy narcissism?
There are first world problems, and then there are 90210 problems, and then there is the unreliable gardener who once over-trimmed the bonsai tree beside the Arowana pond in the sunken garden of your private Luxembourg vacation villa, and then there's this.
I get it. The Concorde is sexy. If I sunk my backside into a Bugatti Veyron the first words out of my mouth would be "I could get used to this real quick."
Need? Not so much.
If it's the Google network, than that would be one of the most peered with networks in the world you are connected to.
I think Google doesn't even buy transit. Just like a Tier 1 network.
So peering shouldn't be an issue.
New things are always on the horizon
But we already know about it. Could you have maybe written up an nice little review of you experiences, such as what is suggested in this post:
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4709907&cid=46062875
I'm sure you could flesh it out more with your families in home experience, in regards to the various bandwidth related applications and device we use these days. It's great that it reminded you love the internet, but a little content on why could have helped. Google Fiber is a month or two away from me. When I get it, can I post the same article with Kansas City related news links and get on the front page too?
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
https://static.googleuserconte...
for 84601 you should get
http://www.directv.com/DTVAPP/...
also they seem to be missing the BIG TEN overflow channels.
Veracity seemed to least have root sports.
http://residential.veracitynet...
Maybe my tin foil hat is too tight but it seems curious to me that Provo in Utah County is the first city to get this service from Google when just a little way up I-15, at the point of the mountain, is the largest NSA facility in the country. Just sounds like a match made in heaven.
Google is a front for the NSA. Can't believe there are people who still don't know this.
Google IS a tier 1 network. They own a significant amount of fiber on long term leases. Where they actually selling access (outside their test projects) they would be one of the larger international networks.
The content is in the first link.
It could have been identified better, but it is there.
He doesn't mention latency, but he does say he clocked 915 Mb/s both up and down.
You could try reading the article.
Maybe my tin foil hat is too tight but it seems curious to me that Provo in Utah County is the first city to get this service from Google when just a little way up I-15, at the point of the mountain, is the largest NSA facility in the country. Just sounds like a match made in heaven.
Google is a front for the NSA. Can't believe there are people who still don't know this.
Google Pwnz the NSA, or was it vice versa... Can't believe there are people who still don't know that one of those is true.
Google Fiber Launches In Provo — and Here's What It Feels Like
Why all the hate for Google?
Here in New Hampshire we have to choose between Fairpoint or Comcast.
Would you like to know what *that* feels like?
First of all Google Internet was not 100 times faster in Provo. Provo has had fiber that could go 1Gbps for almost 10 years now and everything he said he could was being done 10 years ago. The biggest difference is that Google now owns the $40M fiber network that they paid $1 for instead of Provo City. What makes it even better is the citizens still have to pay for the $40M bond that built the network. But wait, there's more. What they didn't tell you is Google is kicking all commercial customers off their network and now government agencies and schools have to pay for the network instead of getting it for free.
To sum it up, Provo gave up millions of dollars a year in revenue for the opportunity to have Google come to town and charge them for the same Internet that they already had for free while simultaneously offending all business owners by kicking them off the network and sticking them with the bill.
An interesting side effect of Google's fiber offering is the sudden competition it's putting in some places where it hardly existed before, and allowing us to examine the results.
I have a friend who lives in Provo (about 10 miles south of me) and will be eligible for Google Fiber when they open it up in his area this March. He has had Comcast Internet service for a couple of years now and is planning on switching to Google when he can. However, about a month ago a Comcast representative came directly to his home, unscheduled, to talk about a "new and improved" service level he was now eligible for.
This Comcast rep told my friend that, effective immediately (all he had to do was call Comcast), he could change his current ISP service to a package that offered 250 Mbps down / 150 Mbps up, no bandwidth cap, for $25 / month. To compare, he was currently getting 25 Mbps down and paying $75 / month. A couple of weeks ago he made the switch and has been very happy with the order of magnitude speed increase and 66% price drop.
I understand the concept behind competition and the magical invisible hand, but this sort of behavior sickens me. If Comcast can drop their prices and increase their service offerings so quickly in response to new competition, it just goes to show how badly they are screwing over most of their other customers. And, of course, when I called them to inquire about this amazing new Internet service they were offering, I was told it was a "not available" in my area and that different "geographical regions" have different prices.
There's a real argument here for municipal/state owned and funded fiber networks being leased out to various commercial (or otherwise) ISPs. If Google and Comcast can both offer this kind of bandwidth for these prices, the current state of affairs in most of the rest of the country is completely unjustified. I'm sick and tired of a few "elite" corporations getting an effective monopoly on Internet service offerings in vast areas, able to charge anything they please because people have no other option.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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I don't think I need to explain the analogy, especially to those who live in small town USA like I do where every commercial property except the Walmart is boarded up and for sale.
> but it seems curious to me that Provo in Utah County is the first city to get this service from Google
Does it seem less curious when you realize Provo is NOT the city? Kansas City, Kansas got it, then Kansas City, Missouri. Before either of those, a neighbourhood in California. So there were two and a half other cities before Provo.
Maybe click the first link in the story ?
Nah, that would never work.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
So I can only assume it's like having sex with a supermodel on a flying unicorn.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
So you can get your Advertisements and spam delivered even faster...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The new dial up.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
How would they know?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
What's the data cap?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
So are Yahoo, Cisco, AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast. Not much people can do.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Maybe a few years ago. I just did a quick google check and everything seems to point to around 1.2 to 1.3MB. On a 1mb/s connection, that's about 10 seconds to load a webpage. I'm sure popular websites like Facebook and Twitter (with large images and photo galleries) are significantly higher.
You also need to keep in mind all of the things we currently cannot do because of these restrictions. I'm a scout leader and often take lots of photos at our meetings and outtings. For privacy reasons we aren't comfortable posting them on social websites. I would love to be able to put them on my home server and let parents download them directly (possibly with a password or something), but our shit upload speeds (2.5Mb/s is about the max around here) make that VERY difficult. Throw in some videos and the simple act of sharing media with parents has saturated my internet connection to the point where I can't even receive emails.
Even something as simple as uploading a high definition video to youtube can literally take overnight for the vast majority of North Americans.
Or am I missing something?
1 gbps = he likes the Internet.
End of story?
"k"
Peering is *always* an issue. Some companies do it well. Some do not.
At this point, no one has said who the carrier really is. It could be Google. It could be a locally source carrier. A few traceroutes would at have given us a hint.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Most people who love to post these high speedtest numbers are people who's provider runs a speedtest server. Ok, so you can get that speed to their central office. Big deal, I get those speeds to our speedtest server at work... because it is down the hall from me.
A real speed test involves going off network and a good distance away. I generally test to FastServ Networks in California because they have a solid network on their test server, it is off my ISP (at home and at work) and in a different state. If my speed is good to them, I can confidently say my Internet connection is fast: I have a good uplink all the way to the outside world, off my network.
Also there is the question of congestion, or rather lack of it. I can't imagine Google is doing point-to-point fiber. It is probably GPON. That means the more subscribers in an area, the less speed.
I just question his gushing a bit because at work, I have "gigabit" speeds. I'm on a gig link, to a 10gig building link to our central systems. I'm not sure what our total off campus speed is, it's around 2gig to the Internet, 10gig to I2, but I haven't looked. Speedtests to FastServ show about 400mbits up and down generally during the work day. Downloads are nice and zippy, a Linux torrent just screams, and we have Akamai cache engines on the network so things like Windows updates are almost wire speed.
However for all that, I don't notice much difference over my home network, which is about 30mbit. I do for big downloads, of course, but not for general browsing. The speed of page loads seems to be limited mostly by rendering all the javascript and DHTML they use these days, not by the line, and I can stream whatever I like with no issues.
My mistake.
I for one welcome our Googleie Overlords(tm).
Praise them in their GooGooGooglie Goodness.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Can anyone comment on the type of enclosures they are using in the public right of ways, from an aesthetic point of view? Are they large? I recall that other communities have been up in arms about their size and placement. If you are the unlucky one where they plop it down right in front of your house is there any recourse?
what I've found is that you can only load web pages as fast as the ads that it links to load it. You can literally wait for an ad companies embedded ad to load before seeing the rest of the page. :/
Yes, I'm only using 3 Mbps at home. It's slightly better than 1.5 Mbps, and for video it's way better than 384 kbps. I've got a T3 at work (45Mbps), shared with a couple of coworkers, and for downloading large software images it rocks, but I don't download a lot of Linux ISOs at home. (And most of the video I watch at work is training or equivalent, with talking heads and slides; 384kbps was plenty for that back in the day.)
As it is, when I'm doing Ubuntu updates, it usually takes longer to install them than to download on the 1.5Mbps T1, for the virtual machines that live over in the testing side.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I am ruined for all else.
Instead of hosting a server at home you could upload it to a cloud storage service like Google Drive or something.
What bitrate are those "1080p" videos at? Oh, I thought so.
Imagine having that 1Gb connection. Imagine that you can't use it all but that you can do anything you want with it. do you think maybe you might sit down and ponder, that you might try to imagine better ways to use it? Cloud backup service is obvious and done. Video is done and being done. Keep going. Just sit and use your imagination and I suspect that you will eventually think of something new that cannot be done now with existing normal bandwidth. Maybe it's something silly, maybe it's something crazy, maybe it turns out to be something life changing.
THAT is why we need to have bandwidth well over and above what we have now. We need to have enough that people sit down and think up new ways to use, innovate, maybe find a way to save a life or help another. We've done this with CPU and GPU for a long time, disk space too. My first HDD was 40MEG and nearly the size of a shoebox. Suppose way back then someone had spoken as you have and decided that we would never need more and was listened to. We need to bring fuel for dreams and imagination - right now we're WELL behind the curve for that...
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Yes, this is exactly why so many TV shows are now broadcast in 5.1 surround sound - for the cheapo' radios that the 99% have /s
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Does anyone find it just a little coincidental that this latest Google fiber rollout is only about 20 miles from the NSA's newest datacenter in Bluffdale UT? Lots of bandwidth infrastructure was already in the neighborhood :)
"False hope is why we'll never run out of natural resources!" - Lewis Black
First of all, we shouldn't have to rely on offsite hosting, we should be able to do this ourselves. Second of all, some of us like to keep control of our files ourselves, particularly when it comes to banking files, personal photos, tax forms, etc. Third of all, syncing with services like Google Drive can be a P.I.T.A. to set up and can be very disruptive when these services are modified or closed down.
If we had proper (bi-directional) home internet connections we wouldn't need large storage devices with us and could simply remotely access our files from home whenever we want to listen to music or transfer a report we've been working on for work/school/etc.
Data expands to fill the space available. It doesn't matter what the super fast super large digital thing is this year, at some point it will feel slow and old. Remember 10Mbit ethernet? That was TEN times as fast as 1Mbit!!!!!! It GIFs loaded instantly from your fileserver compared to waiting for them to load on dialup.
If we had proper (bi-directional) home internet connections we wouldn't need large storage devices with us and could simply remotely access our files from home whenever we want to listen to music or transfer a report we've been working on for work/school/etc.
You have NO IDEA how much more dangerous that could potentially be than storing them at a third party site.
and yet we apparently have dark fiber all over the place. Aren't we squeezing ever more capacity out of existing fiber? Is bandwidth somehow getting more expensive? That would be odd now wouldn't it?
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
" the second of three scheduled cities to get speeds that are 100 times faster than the rest of America"
Excuse me? I get 300 mbit on my cable modem. 100 times faster? Try THREE.
False advertising like a motherfucker, Google.
Slashdot should be held responsible for the additional false advertising they're doing.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
As with all ISPs, speed means shit:
- Whats the contention ratio, compared to other ISPs in the area?
- How many hops to your favourite website, vs other ISP's?
- How stable is your ping, vs other ISPs?
- When the service becomes more populated, how much impact will this have on your connection?
For people like me, who play online games, low latency and stability is everything. A 100TB connection means nothing if a 5mbit connection with 1:1 ratio can provide a smoother, more stable internet.
I suppose i'am lucky. I've had the chance in my past career to use a 1:1 10mbit leased line at midnight to see what true internet really is. My 80mbit/40mbit BT infinity doesnt even come close to it.
It might be a year or two before Google's internet starts to show its suffocation on the network, but it will. And when it does, that advertised speed wont mean shit :)
I have been using gigabit internet in Japan on/off for a few years now. You can get close to gigabit speeds on a single PC, certainly in the 90-100MB/sec range for downloads. Latency to nearby services is under 5ms.
This all really misses the point of having gigabit internet. It allows multiple users to act freely without disturbing each other, even if one decided to start a torrent or something. Cloud services are extremely usable because your upload and download speed means even large files are not a problem. Anonymous P2P systems like Perfect Dark work well too. Services that don't exist here, like streaming HD from a smart TV to your phone, exist too. In fact even your phone can get 150Mb/sec WiMax 2 here.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Google is doing it, DOCSIS 3 gets us 300+Mbps, and FIOS has made some inroads with fiber into the home - I have it. Other countries are doing it too albeit with more density.
My point was that it CAN and would be utilized and that there IS a point for rolling it out. If we all took the attitude of "good enough" I'd still be listening to a 2400baud modem making connections.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Oh lord. It used to be commonplace for parents to regularly place Disney VHS tapes. The same movie, multiple times.
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if kids found a way to wear out Disney DVD's. They can certainly grind the players to dust.
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
Google, Fiber and Provo.
As part of my job some years ago, I would routinely visit Level3 data centers across the US. We were a simple stub network, but where I usually plugged my laptop in, was only a hop a way from the Level3 core routers at each facility. Everything was gigabit, and very fast, but not as fast as you would think, being that close to the backbone. I had to use our own DNS servers for resolution, which were not available in every facility, and, page loads were fast, but you could tell you were always waiting on the web servers to deliver the content. Point: Sometimes raw speed is not where it is at. There is something to be said about an ISP having massive amounts of cache/caching servers and a speedy DNS infrastructure.
> syncing with services like Google Drive can be a P.I.T.A.
Well, the desktop client let's you sync as a background process (it even runs as a service so you don't need to start it up manually).
Works like a charm and is very easy to set up IMHO. It also let's you manage the file permissions in a very clear way.
What I *do* find a P.I.T.A. is manually installing and configuring Apache / FTP on my local home computer and making sure it's not going to be a security vulnerability...
Great googlie mooglie!
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Really, your download speeds are very dependant on other factors between you and them. If they're on a 10Mb/s pipe, or they're serving 10,000 users on a GigE pipe, you won't get your 100MB/s. When I go looking for bottlenecks, that's where I find most of the problems.
Friends usually call or email me when they're having throughput issues with sites. They ask me to try downloading from somewhere, because it's slow from there. Sometimes it's the user's problem. Frequently it's something closer to the server.
Edge CDNs, and better bandwidth for servers is helping that a lot. I could be mistaken, but I don't think anyone is being offered 10Mb/s drops any more (thankfully).
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Praise the Great Googlie, brother.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Using gigabit Internet, even in its infancy, opened my eyes to speed and reminded me of why I love the Internet
I used to have 100mb cable Internet, but it didn't seem much faster than the 18mb low end cable service. I later switch to another ISP that offered FTTH and markets all residential connections as dedicated bandwidth, not to mention they use dedicated P2P fiber.
This 50mb fiber feels several times faster then my old 100mb cable. My bet it has something to do with my sub RTT 1ms average cached query latency from their DHCP assigned DNS servers(0.000-0.001 according to Steve Gibson's DNS Benchmark program), plus they do no traffic shaping and have no choke points in their routing. I gave up running a local DNS server because their DNS servers are faster than anything I can build, even though mine are on my local network and their's are 2 hops away. I have yet to find a route to anywhere in the world that has congestion at any time of the day, so long as the route stays on their upstream provider's network. Their up stream provider has a strict "no congestion" peering policy, so you will never see a peering link with congestion, though you may see the hop after the peer showing congestion.
It's not the connection speed, it's the quality of everything beyond the connection. My 50mb residential connection feels faster than my work's 10gb connection, which they also use the same company that sold me my 100mb cable.
Are you using tabbed browsing to workaround one of the failures of all modern browsers - back always results in a page reload?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
The only thing more expensive than a big fiber network is a big copper network. About every 5-8 years, AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast each spend enough to cover the entire USA in fiber, just to keep their copper networks up to par. That means every 5-8 years, they together spend about 3x the cost to upgrade the USA to all fiber. Fiber has about a 30% lower opex than copper, and opex is about 60% of the cost of a modern ISP. They could reduce their total costs by 15%, and when you're making 5% margins on your revenue, reducing your costs by 20% over all is like quadrupling your net profits.
Apple iCloud might be a better solution for you, specifically photostream. There is the level of control that you're seeking. The only requirement you listed that it doesn't offer is that the files are hosted on someone else's machine.
There are benefits to offset the drawbacks, though. For instance you don't need to worry about maintaining the machines, and you also don't need to pay for the power and equipment for a whole server.. just whatever fees they are charging for your amount of data.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I don't think you know what the term "front" means.
Let's see, using key-only ssh access to a home server versus one of the many cloud systems that have dozens of attack vectors (webdav, ftp, http(s), etc) enabled. Personally, I like having control of which services have access to my data (ex: turn ftp 100% OFF, disable ssh password authentication), how often fixes are applied and brute-force prevention/monitoring. Not to mention that I don't have to worry about somebody else's account hosted at the same data centre as mine causing an FBI red flag and having the entire data centre confiscated.
We currently have shit for bandwidth, many people want way more bandwidth and could argue they need more bandwidth NOW much less in the future. Billions? How about the money already given to these companies by our Govt. actually be used for rolling it out? The Govt. and the people, except apparently for you, recognize that bandwidth offers opportunity and innovation. I will point out, again, that if everyone had your attitude we'd still be using 2400baud modems to download ASCII p0rn instead of streaming HD movies from Netflix. Were it not for bandwidth Netflix simply wouldn't have the business opportunity that they have now. You apparently think that all of these opportunities are done and gone despite what Google is doing - wake up.
Other countries are already doing this - we are FAR from the top of the heap when it comes to availability much less bandwidth. I spoke to someone just tonight from Finland who told me that network access was as much a critical utility as water where she's from. Our attitudes, and yes your's, are all wrong. If there's fail here it's you.
Done feeding the troll now O/
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
1gb with 1,000 ms latency means 125MB of buffer, multiply by 1,000 ports and you're talking about over 100GB of network buffers on a single switch. When you're talking about a modern Ethernet based network, latency indicates congestion which means you don't have 1gb of bandwidth. You don't get latency, you get packet loss.
You could try reading the article.
"Reading the article?" You remember this is Slashdot, right?
While I agree that fiber is probably the most future proof way to implement a new network, gigabit Internet access doesn't really get me super excited. The average household simply doesn't have a compelling use case for it. In my area I get 30Mbps down / 2Mbps upfor about $60/mo and it works fine. My wife and I each have a smartphone and tablet, we have a computer, two Netflix-connected TVs (we don't have cable TV) and a Chromecast. It all works "good enough". The only time I really find I want more bandwidth is the rare occassion I upload a video to Youtube.
So yes gigabit Internet is great, and I wouldn't turn it down, but the problem is getting enough people excited about it. I think if you took 100 people from all over the USA and gave each of them a choice between 1) upgrading their Internet go gigabit for the same monthly price 2) filling up their gas tank or 3) dinner and a movie you wouldn't get more than a third of the folks taking the Internet offer.