Call it the miracle on Francis Street. Last year Ryan and Jenny Carpenter got a deal seemingly too good to be true in their Kansas City, Missouri, neighborhood: an installer from Google Fiber wired their bungalow to give them at least 50 times their previous Internet access speed and a substantially better TV service, all for only $125 a month, tax included—just a few dollars more than they’d been paying Time Warner Cable.
Ryan Carpenter still speaks in amazed tones of the December night when he simultaneously streamed four high-definition TV shows (two Christmas specials, an episode of The Office, and a Kansas University basketball game), recording three of them on the included two-terabyte DVR. That’s two more shows than he could previously watch at once, with plenty of capacity to spare. “It just blows my mind—we can be running video via Wi-Fi on two smartphones and on two laptops, and also be watching and recording TV shows all at the same time,” he says. “It’s a vastly superior service.” And that’s even without touching high-bandwidth Web apps that work seamlessly at superfast speeds, such as 3-D maps of cities that have imperceptible load times.
To read the original article: Comcast, Verizon Wireless, and Time Warner Cable. When Will the Rest of Us Get Google’s Gigabit-per-Second Service? | MIT Technology Review
