Two gigabits per second! That’s more than 50 times faster than the very fastest digital subscriber line service available from Telkom, which tops out at 40Mbit/s. Yet a Sony-backed Internet service provider in Japan, So-net Entertainment, is offering 2Gbit/s access in and around Tokyo.

Upload speeds aren’t far behind, offering a blistering 1Gbit/s.

What could you do with a connection that fast? Let’s crunch some numbers. Given that there are eight bits in a byte, a 1Gbit/s connection would capable of downloading data at 128MB/s, so a 2Gbit/s line would mean 256MB/s downloads.

At that sort of speed, it’s possible to download an entire 4GB full high-definition movie in just 16 seconds. A typical standard-definition film is about 700MB. Your movie would be ready for viewing in less than three seconds, compared to the more than 23 minutes it would take on a Telkom 4Mbit/s line running at full speed.

Even if you download a 4K ultra-high-definition movie – currently the highest commercially available resolution at four times the resolution of full HD — the download would only take eight minutes. Alternatively, you could just stream it, with no worries about buffering. The average 4K movie is about 120GB in size.

An entire album, compressed using the MP3 format, would take about half a second to download. Even an album in an uncompressed format like Flac would take less than two seconds.

Of course, these calculations assume ideal conditions and don’t take into account the other bottlenecks one could run into. The speed of a download is the function of the slowest connection between you and the server with which you’re interacting.

Also, most Wi-Fi routers have a maximum speed of 54Mbit/s, or less than 7MB/s — so that 2Gbit/s connection will suddenly be a lot slower if you want to hook it up to a hotspot. Even the most modern Wi-Fi technology wouldn’t keep pace. And most wired Ethernet adapters support only 1Gbit/s transfers. South African broadband users will surely be thinking that’d be a nice problem to have. — (c) 2013 NewsCentral Media