According to Betsy Isaacson of
Huffpost, the company isn't any happier about slow Internet Service Providers than its customers are. Hence its
new websbite
for comparing Netflix streaming speeds across ISPs both nationally and
internationally...
In January, the company announced it would begin streaming Super-HD and 3D movies
-- but only to customers whose ISPs supported the formats. Subscribers
to services like Cablevision and Google Fiber were given new, 3D options
while subscribers to other, more intransigent ISPs (like Time Warner
Cable and AT&T) were encouraged to contact their Internet providers.
The company is probably delighted with with the options available to Netflix subscribers in Kansas City, home of the world's
fastest home internet service, Google Fiber.
For
$70 a month, the company offers Kansas City residents a 1-gigabit
Internet line...about 150 times faster than the average American broadband
speed of 6.7 Mbps...
There’s
also a “free” plan: After you pay a $300 construction fee—which you can
split into 12 payments of $25—Google will provide your home with a
5-Mbps Internet line for “at least seven years,” and probably
indefinitely. (Legally, the company needed to provide an end date for
service.)
...For about the same
fee that many Americans currently pay for cable, Google is offering
Internet speeds that, until now, were available only to big companies
for thousands of dollars a month.
...one
of Casas’ assistants loaded up Google Fiber’s speed test page. A few
seconds later, we saw the astounding results: The computer was getting
938.24 Mbps download speeds, and uploads were at 911.67 Mbps. By
comparison, my AT&T U-Verse home Internet line—which costs me about
$60 a month, only slightly less than Google Fiber’s 1-GB plan—gets
downloads of about 22 Mbps and uploads of 3 Mbps. Google’s download
speeds are 42 times faster than mine and its uploads are 303 times
faster. When I saw those numbers, I had to stifle a few tears.
Casas’ assistant pulled up a high-definition video on YouTube. It
started playing immediately. Then he opened another browser tab and
launched another 1080p video. Then another and another and another—he
kept going until he had five videos playing simultaneously. (He’d muted
the sound.) Next he clicked on each tab and fast-forwarded each video to
a random spot in the middle. They started playing from that spot
instantly, with none of them sputtering or slowing in any way.
...Unbeknownst to most techies in Silicon
Valley, Kansas City has a thriving startup scene... Nick Budidharma, is a gamer who just graduated from high
school and is starting a multiplayer game hosting service
... Budidharma
says that he doesn’t spend as much time thinking about which pictures to
upload to Facebook, as there’s almost no upload delay—“I just throw
them all up there.” He’s also noticed a huge improvement in multiplayer
games. In the first-person shooter Counter-Strike, “there’s a
thing called peeker’s advantage—if you quickly peek around a corner that
someone else is already looking down, the person with the better
latency will see the other person first,” Budidharma says. With Google
Fiber, that “can be close to a 1-second advantage—I can see people a
little faster than they can see me. And I’ve noticed that I’ve been
consistently scoring five or 10 kills higher than I normally do.”
Tangentially related: the
Everything's Up To Date In Kansas City number from the 1955 film version of
Oklahoma. The superlatively cerebral choreography of
Agnes de Mille starts at about the
2:24 mark. Yes, Agnes
was related to famed director Cecil B. de Mille — she was his niece.
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