It has been a little more than three years since the Kansas Cities - both Kansas and Missouri - won a national competition to be the first places to get Google Fiber, a fiber-optic network that includes television and Internet running at 1 gigabit a second. That is about 100 times as fast as the average broadband connection in the United States (on which it would take about 2 1/2 minutes to download 612 kitten photos).
There aren't really any applications that fully take advantage of Google Fiber's speed, at least not for ordinary people. And since only a few cities have such fast Internet access, tech companies aren't clamoring to build things for fiber. So it has fallen to locals - academics, residents, programmers and small-business owners - to make the best of it.
"I wish there was one thing where I could be like 'Dude, get ready, this thing is going to blow your mind,'" said Matthew Marcus, co-founder of the Kansas City Startup Village, a network of companies clustered around State Line Road, which divides Kansas City, Kansas, from Kansas City, Missouri. "But there isn't yet."
Still, while there isn't yet a killer app, it isn't for lack of trying. Ideas have ranged from installing fiber-connected cameras in high-crime areas to building a model home where entrepreneurs could test new kinds of Internet-connected appliances.
By Ruchi Singh
reporter
Park Sae-jin
swatchsjp@ajunews.com
