After a whole (vacation) week worth of back-issue reading through stacks of geek magazines and industry reports, here’s a couple of consumer digital connectivity statistics I thought worth sharing.

Each item individually may not be much news. But in aggregate, these developments provide pretty impressive guidance we are well on our way to moving from an already not-too-shabby megabit society to one a thousand fold faster.

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I got a mass email from one of my city council members the other day.

Where I live, there’s a pretty good chance that any news coming from city hall could have something to do with the latest mass FBI indictments, city officials arrested for being drunk and disorderly, or 25% property tax increases – but this email instead concerned one of our more forward-thinking council person’s plans to apply on behalf of the city to take part in Google’s experimental 1 gigabit fiber-to-the-home network trial program.

1 Gbps internet access – imagine web apps running as crisply as locally-installed desktop applications, HD video streaming at lower compression rates, 30 frame-per-second Skype video calls, and lastly, as computing cycles move from the CPU on your desktop (or your lap) up into the cloud, ever-thinner operating systems.

And that’s where Google comes in.  You may not have heard much about Chrome OS yet, but you will soon.

Because Google has …A Plan.

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