I’ve been in Kansas City for about 15 hours now. Yes, I’ve already made the requisite stop at Arthur Bryant’s for barbecue (and I’m going to Oklahoma Joe’s today)—but we all know that’s not why I’m here.

I’m here to experience Google Fiber. You know, the service that promises 1Gbps for $70. The one that could potentially be incredibly disruptive if fully deployed across America. And yes, the one that prompted one Kansas City Web developer to pony up to buy a four-bedroom house and turn it into the Homes for Hackers—aka, the HackerHome.

I’m sitting, as I type this, at the Homes for Hackers, in Kansas City, Kansas. I can touch the Google Fiber box. I know I’ve become the envy of American geeks everywhere. My Twitter followers and Facebook friends have expressed all the myriad forms of speed lust.

I’ve posted the requisite speedtest pics (see below). My first test was on Google’s own testing page, which returned 464Mbps down and 835Mbps up—the guys at the house had told me there had been reported speed issues earlier today and that these results are slow. As of right now, Wednesday morning, that same testing page is only returning about 30-50Mbps down—obviously far slower than it should be. (We have an e-mail to Google about this issue and will report back.)

A gigabit to where?

I have to say, though, I’ve yet to see stuff load crazy fast. I’ve tried all kinds of tests, traceroutes, normal Web use, Hulu/Netflix, and BitTorrent. I downloaded 1.2GB worth of data on BitTorrent (more than 7,000 seeds) in about 15 minutes. But another 25GB torrent has been going for nearly 10 hours, with 17 seeds at around 200kB per second.

In other words, so far, it seems like a gigabit connection really only gets close to such high speeds if you have something on the other end to serve it adequately and not throttle or otherwise slow it down. Even major websites like Microsoft were only serving me with a Windows 8 download at about 1-2MB per second, comparable to what my Ars colleagues on non-Fiber connections were getting.

As Ars staffer Lee Hutchinson pointed out, "You've in essence removed a bottleneck that the Internet isn't yet structured to deal with being removed. Having that much pipe means you're basically plugging your computer directly into the thing you're downloading from. Your own bandwidth is so great that it becomes immaterial. It becomes a question of how much bandwidth the other side has available."

So, Ars readers, what is a simple, meaningful test that I can do to best understand how fast this connection truly is (or isn’t)? What downloads or uploads can I run to really push this network to its limits? I’m in town for about another 20 hours and will have a full report on Fiber and the Kansas City Hacker Village up before I head out.

Listing image by Aurich Lawson