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[Neight]

Google is coming to my town (Kansas City) and installing reasonably priced Gigabit internet (1000 Mbit up and down).  Since we're the only game company in the metro area, we have to represent. What game or service would you make if you had access to this kind of bandwidth?

[bateleur]

Well, since you can't guarantee that the players will have good bandwidth the only way to make use of something that big is to support lots of players. Unless you have access to some big servers too that probably means some relatively simple gameplay so that the server can handle large numbers of players at once.

[Neight]

I'm really kind of interested in services like Playtomic. I'd like to see services like this expanded to other platforms and aspects of gaming.

So these speeds aren't unheard of. They exist. The two advantages this affords us are cost and physical access to our servers.  So maybe the trick is hooking up something other than rack servers to the internet.  I haven't figured it out yet. That's why I'm here. 

For those who find this real world situation too restrictive, Google does plan on expanding the service to other cities.  And I think the hope is that other services will have to step up their bandwidth.  So I'll ask a more fantastic question: What would you do if Everyone had Google fiber?

[bateleur]

What would you do if Everyone had Google fiber?

That would be great, because it would become practical to run multiplayer games on one client and stream the entire game state to all the other players continuously.

[Evan Balster]

Exactly what I'm doing now.

[mcc]

I would stop feeling guilty about sending XML over the wire.

[TheLastBanana]

1 gigabit per second

Wow! When this gets to Canada, I'll finally be able to fulfill my life's dream of paying $0.25 per second.

Seriously though, it's nice to see that Google is doing something with all that fiber they've gathered up. Hopefully it'll work well - more bandwidth would be a great boon to gaming (and other things too).

EDIT: Oops, that said gigabit.

[jotapeh]

1 gigabit per second

Wow! When this gets to Canada, I'll finally be able to fulfill my life's dream of paying $2 per second.
[/quote]

I hate UBB as much as the next guy but 1 Gigabit ≠ 1 Gigabyte

That said, fuck our telecom companies. Seriously.

[Nix]

1 gigabit per second

Wow! When this gets to Canada, I'll finally be able to fulfill my life's dream of paying $2 per second.

Seriously though, it's nice to see that Google is doing something with all that fiber they've gathered up. Hopefully it'll work well - more bandwidth would be a great boon to gaming (and other things too).

Like watching 1080p video stream real-time without having to wait for it to buffer.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

i can already do that on my cable connection -- youtube 1080p videos run fine for me, without buffering -- and i only get about 1.1 mb/sec

[Nix]

i can already do that on my cable connection -- youtube 1080p videos run fine for me, without buffering -- and i only get about 1.1 mb/sec

Actually, so can I. Bad example.

[andrewjb]

MMOG of some sort, even if it's MMO pong (been done, but a tech demo is a tech demo.)

If anything, you could just talk the technical capabilites, compare to previous tech, and the potential possibilities it could provide to gaming.

[Neight]

i can already do that on my cable connection -- youtube 1080p videos run fine for me, without buffering -- and i only get about 1.1 mb/sec

The video raises an interesting point though. We would be able to receive video streams from a high number of players at once. Everyone's avatars could have a live webcam feed for their faces. The Chat Roulette MMO!

It doesn't actually have to be webcam video. Maybe screen capture. Like the onlive arena, where you can watch any game being played on the service, and there's even a screen where they've composited a bunch of them. Again, not sure what I'd do with it, but we're getting somewhere.

[TheLastBanana]

I hate UBB as much as the next guy but 1 Gigabit ≠ 1 Gigabyte

A gigabyte and a gigabit are generally used interchangeably when it comes to bandwidth. Regardless, there's only 70MB difference between a gigabyte and a gigabit, so you'd still be paying roughly $2 per second.

EDIT: Note to self: do not misinterpret "bit" as "byte", then proceed to give an explanation of how they are one and the same.

[tergem]

~Snip~
It doesn't actually have to be webcam video. Maybe screen capture. Like the onlive arena, where you can watch any game being played on the service, and there's even a screen where they've composited a bunch of them. Again, not sure what I'd do with it, but we're getting somewhere.

Well with the composite you could see which routes or moves where taken the most. Very easy to see how most players play.

[Neight]

I hate UBB as much as the next guy but 1 Gigabit ≠ 1 Gigabyte

A gigabyte and a gigabit are generally used interchangeably when it comes to bandwidth. Regardless, there's only 70MB difference between a gigabyte and a gigabit, so you'd still be paying roughly $2 per second.

You're talking about the difference between a Gigabyte and a Gibibyte. That's about 74MB. There are 8 bits in a byte, so a 1Gbps (Gigabytes per second) is 128MBps (MegaBytes per second).

/Nerdrant

[TheLastBanana]

Woop, misread that. Guess I'm going to have to relinquish my status as a nerd

[Akari]

i can already do that on my cable connection -- youtube 1080p videos run fine for me, without buffering -- and i only get about 1.1 mb/sec

The difference is that with gigabit fiber we could actually do it in good quality!

Though really, even 100Mbps would be easily enough for that, provided that there's no clogs in the tube chain leading from the source to your computer.

[Nix]

I would run a ton of game servers and web servers from home.

[Rob Lach]

I'd setup a small rack of servers and rent out VPS's.