We don’t have Google Fiber in the UK, but based on this news, we’d like to.
Google is targeting ridiculously fast broadband download speeds for the Google Fiber internet service, a new job posting reveals.
The company suggests it’s looking to grow bandwidth to as high as 1Tb/s – that’s about 50,000 times the average UK broadband speed. That’s according to the description for a US job opening at Google Fiber for a Photonics Engineer, as first spotted by Business Insider.
The main challenge for the role, the posting explains, will be to “enable scalable access network bandwidths beyond Gb/s per user in a cost effective manner”.
The next step up from Gb/s is, of course, Tb/s (Terabit per second). In the UK, the average broadband speed is around 22Mb/s, and Google Fiber currently offers 1Gb/s in the US.
Google Fiber is only available in the US
How fast are Tb/s speeds?
At 1Tb/s, it takes just eight seconds to download one Terabyte of data.
To give you an idea of scale, one Terabyte is equivalent to 1,000 Gigabytes. The average file size of a 4K movie is estimated to be just 100GB.
That means with a 1Tb/s internet speed, you could theoretically download a 4K movie in an eighth of a second. And a Blu-ray movie – which averages at about 25GB – would arrive in a quarter of that time.
But 1Tb/s is only the beginning. Eventually, speeds could go well beyond the Terabit entry point, making access to all media near-instantaneous.
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Unfortunately, the fact that Google is still researching how to develop this technology means there’s no telling when such speeds will be available to consumers.
Still, it’s nice to know that Google is aiming high when it comes to download speeds, and that one day buffering hi-res videos might be a thing of the past.
After all, there’s a growing demand for higher internet speeds as file sizes increase in the wake of 4K and VR content.
What’s more, streaming video games is becoming increasingly popular, increasing the need for high bandwidth and low latency.
How much would you pay for 1Tb/s speeds? Let us know in the comments.
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.