We have google fiber at home - Stanford faculty homes have had it the past year, like Kansas City.
It's pretty cool. My record so far is to consume 400Mbps, using 4 computers downloading from about 10 places, all wired through gigabit switches.
In practice, though, it doesn't make much difference compared to a 30Mbps cable modem for most consumers:
most streaming video is < 10 Mbps;
large file downloads are generally limited by a server (or somewhere else in the network?), so it's hard to exceed 30-40Mbps download speed;
web browsing feels about the same, because it's limited by round trips of DNS and http requests, not by bandwidth (spdy will help here?);
many consumer-grade NAT boxes (linksys and friends) are capable of only 100-200 Mbps
The one place it's made a big difference so far is uploads. For example, backup to a cloud backup service (backblaze) often goes 50Mbps or higher. But I did have to try several backup services because some were limited on the server side to a few Mbps.
Running services from home could be a use case too, but then you get into reliability of power/etc, and the fact that so far you can't get a static IP address through google fiber.
So for now google fiber is mostly a fast cable modem from a "don't be evil" provider. I think the real disruption will come with new services that don't really exist yet. What kind of new things can be built if there's enough audience?
I have the Asus RT-N66U, which is rated on that chart for 730+ Mbps (of course, QoS will bring that down). Even the AirPort Extreme is rated for 400+ Mbps, but not QoS to speak of.
That's a great question! Downloading a 1GB file, I peaked at 65 Mbps download rate just now. It ramped up slowly over a period of a few minutes. I was connected to 58 of 60 peers to get that rate.
I'm finding spideroak superior to backblaze - it actually backs up my entire system rather than skipping /Library & /opt and allows me to backup external drives without needing to have them constantly plugged in. I think the pay-for-what-you-use model allows them to be a lot more flexible.
Backblaze has been a rock star for me over a year. It used to be very, very slow (My first backup took the better part of a week to get the "Initial" image in place) - but it was okay because their constant background backups only needed around 1 mbit to be effective (and, more importantly to me - invisible. Time Machine had a bad habit of ramping up my CPU).
But, recently, they must have made modifications to their system - because I routinely see backup in excess of 15 mbits/second. Highly recommended.
With an internet connection like that, CrashPlan might be more interesting. The fact that you could back up to a friends computer would be nifty to test.
It's pretty cool. My record so far is to consume 400Mbps, using 4 computers downloading from about 10 places, all wired through gigabit switches.
In practice, though, it doesn't make much difference compared to a 30Mbps cable modem for most consumers:
most streaming video is < 10 Mbps;
large file downloads are generally limited by a server (or somewhere else in the network?), so it's hard to exceed 30-40Mbps download speed;
web browsing feels about the same, because it's limited by round trips of DNS and http requests, not by bandwidth (spdy will help here?);
many consumer-grade NAT boxes (linksys and friends) are capable of only 100-200 Mbps
The one place it's made a big difference so far is uploads. For example, backup to a cloud backup service (backblaze) often goes 50Mbps or higher. But I did have to try several backup services because some were limited on the server side to a few Mbps.
Running services from home could be a use case too, but then you get into reliability of power/etc, and the fact that so far you can't get a static IP address through google fiber.
So for now google fiber is mostly a fast cable modem from a "don't be evil" provider. I think the real disruption will come with new services that don't really exist yet. What kind of new things can be built if there's enough audience?