What does Google hopes to accomplish with making fiber available?
They want to enable entirely new applications.
For example, online video was an application enabled by the widespread availability of broadband Internet. Before broadband, downloading videos was possible, but streaming was not. Simply put, the (average) rate at which you download frames of video has to be greater than the rate at which frames are displayed for streaming to work.
The most interesting changes were not quantitative, but qualitative.
Google -- and most HN readers -- probably believe that higher broadband speeds are an inevitability, although the process has been going much slower in the US than most of us would like. And new ways of using the Internet will be enabled as speeds get faster. And, if it offers fiber, Google will be at the forefront of that wave, which will help Google by:
(1) Accelerating the change, pushing those new markets to be created sooner than they would have been created without Google Fiber
(2) Putting it in a good position to capture the new markets -- i.e. if Application X is eating a lot of bandwidth on Google Fiber, that might be an early signal that the Application X space is a growth market and Google should find a way to get involved.
They want to enable entirely new applications.
For example, online video was an application enabled by the widespread availability of broadband Internet. Before broadband, downloading videos was possible, but streaming was not. Simply put, the (average) rate at which you download frames of video has to be greater than the rate at which frames are displayed for streaming to work.
The most interesting changes were not quantitative, but qualitative.
Google -- and most HN readers -- probably believe that higher broadband speeds are an inevitability, although the process has been going much slower in the US than most of us would like. And new ways of using the Internet will be enabled as speeds get faster. And, if it offers fiber, Google will be at the forefront of that wave, which will help Google by:
(1) Accelerating the change, pushing those new markets to be created sooner than they would have been created without Google Fiber (2) Putting it in a good position to capture the new markets -- i.e. if Application X is eating a lot of bandwidth on Google Fiber, that might be an early signal that the Application X space is a growth market and Google should find a way to get involved.