KANSAS CITY, KANSAS—I can summarize my whirlwind 36 hours in Kansas City in two words: bandwidth and barbecue.

I spent all day Wednesday testing a Google fiber connection, attending startup events, seeing Google’s “fiber space,” meeting entrepreneurs, chatting with a realtor, and interviewing a city official. All of that was washed down, at the end of the day, with a generous helping of delicious burnt ends and ribs at Oklahoma Joe’s—and yes, I’m exhausted.

So how fast is Google Fiber? Really fast... and it may be far ahead of its time.

That said, I can’t say that I noticed a significant difference in terms of my day-to-day use of the Internet. Even the people in the Kansas City Startup Village (KCSV)—a small strip on the edge of Kansas City, Kansas that was among the first homes to have Google’s gigabit connection—agreed with me.

“Right now, we don’t do anything that requires fast Internet,” admitted Adam Arredondo of LocalRuckus, a new local startup, when I stopped by to learn about their experience.

As many Ars commenters have noted, the rest of the Internet is still really slow in comparison to a gigabit home broadband pipe; there are many other obstacles getting in the way of a full-bore Internet experience. After all, once my Web request leaves the fiber-connected house, makes its way out of the city, and starts talking to the rest of the Internet, there are all kinds of routers, switches, boxes, firewalls, and quality of service (traffic shaping) issues that make it so I can’t actually download an album from iTunes in the blink of an eye.

But my brief taste of what promised to be the craziest, fastest Internet for the lowest amount of money may not have been enough. I may have to stay longer next time to really appreciate it.

Another guy in the same work house as Arredondo, Andy Kallenbach (also known as Ars reader “Andreas_kc”) of FormZapper, said that what he really notices is the high upload speed.

“The best connections that I get personally are to several of our servers colocated in downtown [Kansas City],” he wrote in a comments thread, echoing what he told me in person. “It is just as good as walking into the data center and jacking in. Our nightly deployments take around 10 seconds now. [The only] bottleneck now being somewhat drive speed.”

Other Ars readers have suggested that I’d really start to appreciate it once I spent more time with the connection. Malor, who has a 250MB connection in Chattanooga, commented:

“This is something you need to live with, as opposed to just experience briefly, to start to understand how it matters. The biggest thing is that you never, ever have to think about what you are doing with your connection. It doesn't matter. No matter how crowded either direction is, with that kind of packet throughput, you don't really get latency issues. You don't have the problems with cable modems of saturating the upload link and then seeing your download link hosed. At least, I don't think you ever have that problem; I've never been able to completely saturate my upload, even when it was merely 100Mbps.”

Still, I would definitely throw down $70 a month for a 1Gbps connection, happily tossing aside the $30 basic Internet package (20Mbps) that I get from Comcast in Oakland. I think we can all agree that most Americans would definitely enjoy even a small speed bump on the order of 50Mbps to 100Mbps for around the same price as they’re paying now.

“We have a lot to do in Kansas City”

When I first arrived on Tuesday afternoon, I ran a test on Google’s own speed test page and got 460Mbps down. The two denizens of the Hacker Home (Mike Demarais and Andrew Evans) told me that such speeds were slow—I ran countless tests, ranging from BitTorrent, to multiple Hulu and YouTube streams, to traceroutes. I ran the tests provided by SpeedTest.net and Google fiber speed tool. But there wasn’t anything that could really, adequately test what such high speeds mean beyond clicking Google’s little “begin test” button.

Many commenters suggested things that I couldn’t do, like run a server. (Google’s terms of service forbid that.) Accessing Usenet proved a bit difficult, as I didn’t want to go to the trouble of setting up a new account and paying for it. I also tried running a Tor bridge relay—but even then my connection only tended to hit around 23.5KBps, far lower than what I would have expected. Later on Wednesday, Kallenbach helped me use Go2PC between two machines in different fiber-enabled houses to send a Linux ISO, and that only topped out at about 2MB per second.

The only real test that I could do on a single machine with minimal hassle was to run a script written by Ars’ own Lee Aylward that downloads an Ubuntu ISO from all US-based mirrors (45, in total) at once. When I ran that, I got the best performance I had so far—a whopping 50MB per second—but still far short of what Google should be serving me.

Another thing to keep in mind is that running Fiber over WiFi, of course, slows down the connection noticeably. Google techs who came to visit the Hacker Home Wednesday (we’ll get to that later) told me that they regularly see Wi-Fi speeds of around 100Mbps compared to wired speeds of around 800Mbps.

Other readers asked about the Google fiber service (a $120 package) with TV option (the basic option the house has is only $70 a month). The Hacker Home doesn’t have a TV and doesn’t have that option, so unfortunately I couldn’t test it. In fact, what may be a better test than the one I ran would be to record a bunch of TV shows and then run some of these higher-bandwidth and lower-latency tests (games, Skype calls) simultaneously across multiple machines to see how that stresses network performance.

Ben Estes, a local Google fiber technician who was over at the house Wednesday, estimated that “over half” of the approximately 300 homes in Kansas City, Kansas that have the gigabit installed already have gone for the $120-per-month TV option.

He and his colleague Brett Neal came to the Hacker Home to check out why our gigabit connection had fallen to about 40Mbps. After over an hour of inspections, he determined that the electrical power to the house wasn't sufficient and that once he replaced the fiber jack in the house, everything should be fine. (The Hacker Home hadn't been lived in in about two years, and had some issues with not being able to feed enough power to its new residents and all their devices, including the Google Fiber box. An electrician working at the house that same day expanded its capacity from 40 amps to 200 amps.) By the time Estes and Neal left, they were pulling down 900Mbps-plus speeds. Later Wednesday evening my tests were still resulting in speeds in the neighborhood of 400Mbps.

“Right now there’s only six of us [technicians],” he said, noting that he and his girlfriend were considering moving to this neighborhood just to get fiber access. “By six months, we should be over 100 [technicians]. We have a lot to do in Kansas City.”