How fast is enough?

[ahhaa]

this from the BBC on Digital Britain:

Alongside Wembley City's state of the art recycling system is fibre-to-the-home technology which feeds a whopping 100Mbps into every flat. A third of the apartments are occupied and among the private tenants there is almost 100% take-up of the fibre service, dubbed Velocity 1.
...
James Saunders, managing director of commercial ventures at Quintain explained why. "It would drastically raise operating costs and most people don't need it so we don't think that always-on 100Mbps is the answer at the moment," he said.
Instead people are offered a variety of broadband bundles of 8Mbps (£15.99 a month), 16Mbps (£25.99) and 32Mbps (£35.99). All come with the option to boost the speed up to 100Mbps for a period of half an hour at a cost of £1, with each package offering some free boosts. The boosts are activated by a click on the Velocity 1 website. The packages also come bundled with TV services, some free landline phonecalls and free IT support, including a 9-5 onsite engineer.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7856725.stm

[Joe The Dude]

For me, 200 Mbps would be ideal...

I could feed eight HDTV Tuners with 160 Mbps...
(I'd use 5 for recordings w/padding, and have three available for live TV).

And have 40 Mbps left over for the internet...
Should be more than enough.

But that's just me.
I hope to see such speeds someday, at an affordable price.

Oh, and good old copper for a land line phone.
Too many horror stories with VOIP, and the battery only lasts so long, ya know?
That's a big issue for me, as I live near the coast, and hurricanes like to knock out the power for extended periods.

[nwo]

1GB Broadband like they have in japan! non of this crappy adsl but real Fiber optic cable.

[rallynavvie]

After experiencing fibre internet here at even 20Mb connection speeds I've found that I have more available bandwidth than the sites I'm pulling data from. Sure a single site with farmed graphics can load pretty quick but if you're downloading something from those sites you will hit a wall. The only reason for bandwidth that high in the consumer world is for P2P, and maybe bragging rights

[Video Head]

How fast do you want your pizza? 5 minutes? 10 minutes? 30 minutes? Is sometime within the next 2 hours OK? But the faster you want it, the more it's gonna cost. How hungry are you?

Faster always costs more, but it's nice to have it available when you want it and are willing to pay for it

[RabidDog]

HDIPTV x4 is what its for, and what they should aim at.. In the end the faster speeds simply become mainstream.. anyone wanna go back to 256k BroadBand?? I reckon they could slacken off at about 1gb SDSL..that WOULD make the cloud a reality.

[Video Head]

10 years ago most people were happy using 36.6 dial-up modems, many were still using 14.4 baud rate POTS connection devices (how USR loved those days!).

I wonder what we will have 10 years from now...will Usenet still be around? Will global warming turn Las Vegas into beach front property? Will Hollywood actually produce a decent movie, under budget, that people will pay money to see?

Only time will tell...