Chattanoogans now have access to the world’s fastest Internet service. (Well, Chattanoogans and people in Hong Kong, if you want to get picky.)
EPB’s fiber-optic network can reach download speeds of a gigabit per second. How fast is that? Well, that’s super honking fast, sports fans.
This is so cool. Just thinking about it, I’m starting to vibrate.
One of the reporters here at the newspaper said the boys down at his neighborhood computer-game store are nearly delirious. The thought of unleashing some gigabit-powered death ray on gamers in Asia must be too good to believe.
But let me interject an old-guy question: What now?
Having the world’s fastest Internet is sort of like having a space shuttle in your driveway. Once you sit in the driver’s seat and make juicy engine noises with your mouth, what do you do next?
I don’t know how to use the world’s fastest Internet. Can it beam my kids to bed? Can it microwave my popcorn? Can it jam the TV when my wife watches Lifetime movies staring Valerie Bertinelli?
According to news reports, for $350 a month – the cost of EPB’s residential super-high-speed service – you can do Internet magic such as downloading a high-definition movie in five minutes. Big whoop. I can pop in a Blu-ray DVD in five seconds.
But people smarter than me say this is a big deal, so I defer to them. Big deal, it is.
I was driving home one day a few months ago, and NPR had a report about how people in cities across America were going crazy to get Google Fiber. Google Fiber is an experimental one-gigabit fiber-optic network service like EPB’s optic network here. More than 1,100 cities are vying for this Goggle prize, I’ve learned.
Yes, that’s right, people are drooling on Google trying to get what we already have (sweet!):
Topeka, Kan., famously changed its name to Google for one day, according to news reports.
The mayor of Duluth, Minn., leaped into the cold water of Lake Superior to get Google’s attention, according to a CNN story.
Not to be outdone, the mayor of Sarasota, Fla., jumped into a shark tank, according to online reports.
To these people, I have only one thing to say: Stop jumping into water. Why do you think Google likes people who jump into water? If they did, they would have given their fast Internet to Greg Louganis.
Actually, the concept of loads of people riding our information superhighway into our town has me a little spooked, too.
I was in a McDonald’s restaurant sitting beside three gamer geeks recently, and I realized these guys might as well have been from some outer moon of Jupiter.
These were red-blooded young men, probably in their early 20s, wearing layered black clothes on a 90-degree day. They babbled for 30 minutes about video games without ever once mentioning women, cars or SEC football.
It sounded like this:
“Dude, your kill streak last night was epic during that CTF (capture the flag) match on Blood Gulch,” said one.
“I know, but after I got sniped, a pair of spawn campers were really harshing my groove,” lamented another.
Trust me, you don’t want thousands of these dudes moving to Chattanooga to tap our fat pipe.
Hey, guys, we have a shark tank here too, if anybody wants to take a dip.