Well even in my case that first upload took a couple weeks. 7000 x 7000 would’ve reduced it to just a couple days. That’s a worthwhile benefit if the price is right. Coming down the pipe we’re likely to have 8k video streaming, and proper immersive VR if it ever gets off the ground will warrant even more than 8k feeds to fully resolve the field of view. That may not need all that bandwidth, but for something that’s highly immersive you want a lot more overhead to ensure smoothness and to ride out any network hiccups. I can foresee a use for something like real-time cloud storage at these sorts of speeds, not just really fast Dropbox syncing, but acting like a physically attached drive. It’s getting into USB 3 hard drive speeds after all. Where you have a family sharing these connections, “enough” may not actually be enough. If speeds get truly fast, like tens of gigaBYTES per second, then you open up the possibility of actual mesh computers, not just mesh networking, where you’re directly plugging into more performance from remote computers rather than just screen sharing.
A one off data dump on occasion for a rare subset of users would benefit, not the typical user. People can’t see the difference between 4k and 8k for a large tv in a typical home. Possibly some sort of immersive holographic 360 degree gaming or media but 3D tv was a complete flop so that may never happen either.
A TDR is a communication engineers friend. Also anyone working with large scale networks. Nothing extra special about the idea. It does what it says on the tin. It measures reflections in the time domain. In our case reflections down a physical communications channel. Any glitch in the channel’s physical condition will cause an impedance bump, and signal will reflect off it. Reflections compete with the desired signal, and act to worsen the signal to noise ratio, wrecking the information bandwidth.
A TDR lets you see where the glitches are in time, relative to your measurement position.
A human can turn that into distance, using the velocity factor of the medium. Then they know where to go looking for the damage, and can fix it. Crushed cables or fibres, bad connections, and so on.
An adaptive echo cancellation system can predict the effect and calculate how to remove the reflected energy from the signal. This allows vastly higher information bandwidth than without in the real world. Even a perfect installation has some glitches across connectors, and terminations are never perfect.
Upload does seem where future growth could be needed with sci-fi levels of home automation and monitoring. I can imagine a house with 360° cams everywhere for both security and assistance/automation and all the processing done in the cloud. However, it’s more likely much of that processing would be done on-premises to reduce cost for the providers (power, network, and compute).
New applications for download bandwidth could be daily, custom AI model updates for your robots, cars, appliances.
But I’m just brainstorming here. It’s just as likely neither of these happen.
Glitch can mean almost anything, too, like an otherwise ordinary manipulation of the medium. There exists intrusion detection (or prison escapes, animal movements) instruments that use TDR to determine position of movement of transmission lines. In practice, they run coax along the fenceline and can locate where the fence is shaking by the rustling of the attached coax (the glitch in reflection), alerting the guardhouse before the climbers even make it over the top.
Yeah I came here to post about that. They were planning the rollout in 2010 and in 2012 they brought google fiber to Kansas city.
To add a little color to that: Google rolled it out in Kansas City, Kansas (KCK), first. They didn’t extend across the state line to Kansas City, Missouri (KCMO) until later. If I recall correctly, KCK controlled access to all utility poles, which made the rollout much easier. On the KCMO side, the utility companies had more say about who could attach to their poles, and the rollout would have stretched across multiple counties (Clay, Jackson, etc.), complicating permits and more. They eventually switched to trenching, and now we have it running through the terrace of our front yard. (We also have a competitor’s fiber running through our back yard, so choices ain’t so bad.)
My memory—and possibly understanding—is pretty fuzzy after all this time, so feel free to correct me.