Google recently announced it will attempt to provide a select group of US communities with internet access at an unprecedentedly high rate of 1 gigabit per second – between 100 and 1000 times greater than what's available in most countries. It's 10 times faster than homes receive in the online gaming haven of South Korea – where they plan to have gigabit delivery in 2012. But although the Googlers are sure that such a speed boost is A Good Thing, even product managers Minnie Ingersoll and James Kelly admit they don't know what people will do with such capacity.
What suggestions they do have are a little uninspiring. Would users, they ask, stream 3D medical scans to distant doctors for second opinions? Or watch lectures in 3D while simultaneously collaborating with classmates? Meh. Doesn't sound much fun.
Higher than hi-def
Technology market research firm In-Stat – based in Scottsdale, Arizona, and owned by the same parent company as New Scientist – has some better clues in its latest report. That 3D TV is on the way is already clear, it says, but TV makers, public broadcasters such as Japan's NHK and Britain's BBC, plus some of the movie studios, are already thinking about ultra-high-definition TV (Ultra-HD). Standards bodies like the International Telecommunications Union and the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers are on the case, too.
Offering pictures with a resolution of 4000 lines compared with HD's roughly 1000-line images, the Ultra-HD format currently requires bandwidths of around 45 megabits per second to broadcast 2D images.
With TV on demand evidently here to stay, and 3D and gaming variants of Ultra-HD plausible too, it isn't hard to see how future gigabit fibre networks could be rapidly eaten up. Just like software always expands to fill the memory available, apps that eat gigabits will doubtless appear. full article...
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