Backups to remote systems. Keep significant data in "the cloud". Stream content directly from a friend - why upload/download? Distributed cluster computing / rending farms - make adding FX or fully rendered animation to home movies near real-time. Redundant distributed storage - eliminate backups altogether and keep data safe and accessible. 1080p video conferencing / security monitoring.
Most importantly, probably something we haven't yet thought of.
Off-site backup is a good one. If I backup to a NAS on my Gigabit LAN at home, it should be similar speed to a colo-NAS located within the same datacentre as the ISP. According to the linked site, you can download a 4.7GB DVD in 38 seconds.
Use lower latency video codecs so that video conferencing works better?
It's hard to think about, at least when I'm paying 28 US$ for "up to" 1.5M/364Kbps. The way I'm looking at it, much of the future won't be invented in the US.
Do you mean virtual desktops? You could do it with a regular DSL/cable connection. I have users in India connecting to us in the States through a T3. It is actually pretty sweet; they can even do things like stream audio/video and it goes through just fine.
Thin clients over the internet - a gigabyte connection is faster than a laptop harddisk.
This would be awesome for a lot of home users who wouldn't have to worry about virusses, spyware, etc. It would be awesome for developers because we can ensure that the servers have runtimes for all the scripting languages available and we could make it easy to test your program to make sure it works, since there is only one configuration.
And whomever provide this service would be able to charge a commision fee for selling the software, plus getting money from storage, etc.
I really would love to do this, so if anybody works at an ISP, please get the users some additional bandwidth.
