Last week, Google announced its plans to build an experimental fiber network that would offer gigabit-per-second broadband speeds to up to 500,000 U.S. homes. Google’s network won’t be the first to reach such speeds. There are other high bandwidth solutions internationally, in Hong Kong, the Netherlands, and Australia. Internet2, a nonprofit advanced networking consortium in the United States, has been experimenting with 10-gigabit connections for university researchers.
Large data files and applications through the cloud will require better broadband but routers set, up firewalls, and protocols also have to be up to the mark.
