What gets lost in these discussions of “how far behind the U.S. is” with regard to broadband penetration, is how much is really needed to be useful, rather than what the market observers, academics and even the customers think.
From my experience in the field, as both a provider and a user, I think that a good 2meg connection with decent latency and jitter is plenty for 95% of the applications that consumers or telecommuters are going to use. The other 5% of applications are mostly video related (high definition video and videoconferencing). Two years ago, I would have said 768k would be appropriate, but YouTube and Netflix changed the game considerably.
I work from home a lot, and I have a 4meg wireless connection with a 60gig cap. Last month I used 9.5gig. I use voip daily and video Skype occasionally, my wife downloaded her Adobe suite software last week and syncs up her home machine with her work desktop via Dropbox, my son watches his Lego videos and we grabbed Monty Python and the Holy Grail (among other movies) because he was fascinated with a YouTube clip of the Knights Who Say NIiii.
Everyone has different perspectives on this:
1) Marketers want to tout the fastest speeds possible, and focus on more more more
2) Academics look at theoretical possibilities of networking, and tend to jump past the immediate hurdles toward where they think we should be without giving the transitionary stages much consideration
3) Customers almost always think they need more speed – except for people coming from dialup or satellite.
4) Big ISPs and cellcos are trying to squeeze every last dollar out of each bit going through the network, and are in a conspiracy with the Marketers at #1 to promote the fastest speeds but with all kinds of bells and whistles attached. EBIABE – Each Bit Is A Billing Event
5) Smaller ISPs are scrambling to find the balance between all of these considerations and slowly evolve from where we are now to where we need to be. It is a daily struggle.
What other perspectives do you see?