It has been a little more than three years since the Kansas Cities \u201d\u201d both Kansas and Missouri \u201d\u201d won a national competition to be the first places to get Google Fiber, a fiber-optic network that includes cable television and Internet running at one gigabit a second. That is about 100 times as fast as the average connection in the United States (on which it would take about two-and-a-half minutes to download 612 kitten photos).<\/p>\n
But be careful what you wish for. After a few million in waived permit fees and granting Google free access to public land, the area is finding out that Google Fiber is so fast, it\u2019s hard to know what to do with it.<\/p>\n
There aren\u2019t really any applications that fully take advantage of Fiber\u2019s speed, at least not for ordinary people. And since only a few cities have such fast Internet access, tech companies aren\u2019t clamoring to build things for Fiber. So it has fallen to locals \u201d\u201d academics, residents, programmers and small-business owners \u201d\u201d to make the best of it.<\/p>\n