Igniting the New Internet

Abstract

In 2011, Google announced its plan to bring optical fibre communications to homes in Kansas City. The optical fibre will allow residents to surf the Internet at speeds up to a gigabit per second, roughly 100 times the national average in the US. That would be enough to download a movie in a second. For people who love their online video, Kansas City might become the best place to live in the country. Meanwhile, EPB Fiber Optics, using economic stimulus funds from the US Department of Commerce, has brought gigabit Internet to several thousand homes in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Similar projects are on tap for Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Salt Lake City. The gigabit Internet is coming, a city at a time. But what will people use it for? At present, says Keith Marzullo of the National Science Foundation (NSF), the development of the gigabit Internet is stymied by a catch-22: People won’t ask for fibre to the home if there are no services available for it and developers won’t offer services if they don’t see a market. At the Challenges in Computing conference, Marzullo described a new NSF initiative called US Ignite, which is intended to break this deadlock.