Media for When is broadband broad enough? [Telecom]

When is broadband broad enough? [Telecom]

Since I've been putting effort into trying to obtain faster Internet connectivity for a certain residential neighborhood, plus reading about Google's 1 GB proposals, broadband initiatives from the government, etc., let me raise the meta-question:

What's the target bandwidth that seems reasonably needed for an average, normal single-family residential connection, at present or in the reasonably foreseeable future?

Or alternatively,

Are there any foreseeable applications or capabilities for which this same average, normal single-family customer will really want or need a 1 GB connection in the reasonably foreseeable future?

[Note the "average, normal, single-family" wording, which is meant to exclude any and all special cases where someone is running some kind of heavily used server or performing other commercial-type functions that consume massive amounts of bandwidth.]

My own experience here is with a household containing several active Internet users, including two semi-professionals doing extensive computing, emailing, and web surfing, plus occasional file transfers and document downloads.

And, the experimental fact seems to be that we got along pretty happily for a decade with a 400 kB DSL connection; and are now more than happy with a 5 to 10 MB connection in one location for most of the year, and a

2 MB connection in another location for the rest of the year. (But, we don't do any streaming video watching; have been a "TV-free" household forever.)

My guess is that 95% of this hypothetical "average normal single-family residential market" would be fully happy for the foreseeable future with a solid full-time 10 MB connection, if they also had cable or TV for video and occasionally batch-downloaded films or videos from Netflix or the like.

If you take away the separate TV or cable connection and put everything on a single Internet connection, seems to me a full-time 100 MB (maybe

200 MB?) connection would still provide everything they could reasonably want.

And I have a hard time seeing how they could either want or need 1 GB for any reasonably foreseeable future need (no matter how much of their data or computing goes into "the cloud").

None of this is to argue against running, for example, a direct FTTH cable into to every residence you can, thus providing essentially unlimited future connectivity, even if only 10 to 100 MB of this capacity is initially enabled.

But even having done that, what's the bandwidth at which you've massively exceeded the "information absorption or transmission rates" for most reasonable single-family connections?