Editor’s note: Today, Jason Rushin joins Evan Nagle as alternating authors of the Civil Bytes column.

Like most people, you probably measure your Internet service with two speeds:  “seems fine” and “grrr — why is the Internet so slow?!” But, what with more and more online gaming and Skype video calls and Netflix streaming, your Internet speed is quickly becoming the information superhighway’s bottleneck.

You may have heard of “gigabit” Internet services, popularized by Google’s Fiber service and others, and championed awhile back by Gov. Neil Abercrombie, but do you really need Internet speeds 100 times faster than what you’re currently receiving? Even more, could faster Internet speeds provide an economic boost to Hawaii?

In the U.S., the average home Internet service speed runs just over 11 Mbps, or megabits per second, according to Akamai’s State of the Internet Report. Gigabit is 1,000 Mbps, or 1 gigabit per second.

Internet speed could accelerate rapidly with gigabit services.

Flickr.com

At the U.S. average speed, it takes about 12 minutes to download a 1 gigabyte feature-length movie. With gigabit, it takes about 8 seconds. (For background on bits vs. bytes, click here.)

In the U.S., Hawaii ranks 40th for average speeds by state at 8.4 Mbps.  To put that into perspective, that same 1 GB movie takes closer to 16 minutes to download here. Not a drastic difference, but as high definition movies move to 4K movies, or “quad HD,” the file sizes, and download times, will also increase.

While waiting a few extra minutes for the latest “Game of Thrones” episode to download surely isn’t going to ruin your life, Internet speeds are fast becoming an economic development issue that might benefit your wallet.

Chattanooga, First to Get a Gig

Chattanooga, Tennessee, lays claim to being “the first city in the Western Hemisphere to offer one-gigabit-per-second fiber Internet service.” With that, city leaders are supporting new initiatives and ideas that capitalize on speeds that are over 100 times faster than what we have in Hawaii.

To better understand how gigabit is changing Chattanooga, I spoke with Danna Bailey, VP of Corporate Communications at EPB, the area’s electric power distributor. Surprisingly, the power utility is also an Internet service provider: As it started to roll out its “smart grid” program, which required fiber optic networking, it found that it could add Internet service as a bonus.

“EPB has been around since the 1930s. We see Internet infrastructure in the 21st century much like we saw electrical service in the 20th century. If you gave every house an outlet every 8 feet in 1920, they would never imagine using it. Now, you don’t have enough outlets.”

Much like people couldn’t see the need for wiring an entire home 100 years ago, people today are just starting to think about what they can do with gigabit Internet speeds.

Bailey admits EPB is a bit ahead of the curve, but it’s made the investment so that its customers are ready for whatever the benefits of gigabit might be.

“We have 55,000 homes and businesses connected to our fiber network, and about 4,500 have signed on for gigabit service,” Bailey said.

Oh, and note to HECO:  On the smart grid side, EPB has been able to reduce outages by 50 percent and save local businesses about $100 million per year due to less work time lost to power outages.

Follow the Gigabit Road … to Economic Development

A recently released study from Pew Research surveyed over a thousand experts to better understand how gigabit might impact the average American. Predictions ranged from improved telepresence systems and augmented reality of such quality it would negate the need to travel, to vast improvements in education and medical care.

For Hawaii, eliminating the need to travel is especially attractive (assuming vacationers still prefer real beaches over virtual). For residents, gigabit could power more than just increased quality of video calls like Skype or Facetime. Instead, think of having a birthday party with surround sound and high-definition 3D video of multiple family members all scattered across the globe, yet sounding and appearing as if they were at the same table.

On the medical side, think of a specialist performing a procedure on you via robot and HD video from his office in Chicago while you’re on an operating table in Honolulu, totally eliminating the risk and expense of traveling.

Other predictions in the Pew study range from sensors that measure everything from cars to streets to toys to water heaters, to “life-logging” applications that will record not only video of your every action, but your heart rate, blood pressure, glucose levels and more, every second of every day.

Still, many pointed to the fact that the killer app of gigabit probably has yet to be created. Which is why the undiscovered promise of gigabit’s potential has so many politicians talking about it. And, which is why no one, not even the Internet service providers themselves, can give a compelling reason to buy it. Yet.

When I asked Su Shin, executive director of corporate communications at Hawaiian Telcom, about benefits beyond faster movie downloads, there wasn’t much to add.

“You’ll be able to open multiple pages at the same time with lightning speed on multiple devices,” Shin explained in an email. “So you can do multiple things simultaneously (download files while still surfing the Internet or checking your email, etc.) without interruption which saves precious time.”

So What are the Benefits to Gigabit Cities?

A recent report from Analysis Group, funded by an industry non-profit, claims that gigabit access increases local GDP by 1.1 percent. Behind the gains, the study points to “the direct effect of infrastructure investment and increased expenditures, as well as early shifts in economic activity (e.g., job creation and occupational changes) and productivity gains.”

In other words, most of the current benefit of gigabit comes from the jobs created by building gigabit, not from gigabit itself.

The Gig City, as Chattanooga refers to its broadband initiative, has helped sprout Gigtank, a technology startup accelerator focused on businesses that leverage fast Internet speeds. This past summer, its program focused specifically on 3D printing, health care, and smart grid startups.

EPB’s Bailey pointed to two specific examples of gigabit empowering local businesses: Feetz and a local radiologist.

Feetz, a graduate of Gigtank, produces custom footwear via a 3D printer. Since the customer’s feet are usually hundreds or thousands of miles from Chattanooga, the gigabit speeds make for fast turnaround.

“3D printing requires a lot of bandwidth for the files,” Bailey explained. “Feetz takes advantage of gigabit speeds to get custom 3D images of a customer’s two feet, then builds custom shoes for each foot.”

More locally, Bailey mentioned a radiologist practice that uses gigabit to share files between its offices in Chattanooga. What used to be a painfully slow file transfer or a courier across town for very high resolution images now takes just seconds to share.

Including Gigtank, EPB claims that gigabit has created 1,000 local jobs in the “entrepreneurial space” and that venture capital firms have invested $2.5 million in gigabit-related startups.

What’s the Latest From Hawaii?

In Hawaii, the two main Internet service providers, Oceanic Time Warner Cable and Hawaiian Telcom, have begun to offer residential Internet service that reaches into the hundreds of megabits per second. Oceanic’s “Ultimate” offering provides 100 Mpbs for $80 per month (and rumors mention testing of a 300 Mbps offering), while Hawaiian Telcom offers a blazing 500 Mbps service in limited areas, and at the blazing price of $308 per month.

In 2010, Gov. Linda Lingle’s team applied to be one of the first cities chosen for Google Fiber, but Google chose Austin instead, and Honolulu has yet to hit their future cities map.

In 2011, Gov. Abercrombie announced the Hawaii Broadband Initiative, which targeted bringing gigabit to Hawaii residents by 2018. As of today, it appears as though the Hawaii Broadband Map is the only progress toward that goal.

An email inquiry to state Chief Information Officer Keone Kali was unanswered as of this article’s posting date.

For now, it looks as though Hawaii residents will have to settle for a few hundred megabits per second. But, until that killer app for gigabit is invented, does it even matter?

Or, given Hawaii’s remote location, should we push for gigabit and become a hub for remote workers (both here and on the mainland), all connected with quad HD teleconferencing and able to remotely diagnose or operate on patients, or design parts or products that can be 3D printed elsewhere in moments?

Or, maybe Hawaii should become the hub that invents the killer app for gigabit.