How much bandwidth is enough?

The original appearance of this entry was in Danny Weitzner - Open Internet Policy

Om Malik has a nice post, “Need For Speed: How Real?” asking how much IP bandwidth is enough. He writes:

After years of being stuck in the slow lane, the US consumers are finally going to get a massive speed upgrade and taste the true broadband for the first time. From a 512 Kbps world to 6 Mbps, then 8 and soon 15 Mbps. it seems the future has finally arrived. And with that, the question. how much speed is enough? Can we the consumers really tell the difference between 15 and 30 Mbps?

[Research shows, he says, that as] we increase the speed, the real impact of the speed on what we do with it is marginal. Can your eyes tell the difference between a web-page loading in one second or 0.27 seconds. I guess not. If you can download a music file in 1.08 seconds, does that really mean you will be buying music all the time. No you perhaps will be buying better quality, and perhaps marginally more music. There is the other option, but its just easier to pay! Sure at 30 Mbps you can download DVD quality The Bourne Identity in 11 minutes, but its still going to take you 2 hours to watch it.

[..]

Don’t get me wrong…. I will upgrade, and hope the experience improves, but at some point, we need the applications that truly harness this speed come-along and are allowed to thrive. Not likely in the “we will control the net” attitude adopted by the incumbents. Even in truly immersive multiplayer games, its the latency, not the speed that matters.

The real bandwidth question is when are going to see an increase in the uplink speeds?

I’m acutally not sure that this is the real question, though. It’s always fascinating to ask how much (of anything) is enough but the question seems (a) unanswerable, and (b) perhaps not the most important one to be thinking about, at least from a public policy standpoint. As the so-called Net Neutrality debate heats up again in the US and around the world, policy makers will have to think about how to trade off the need for open, non-discriminatory networks against the desire for higher and higher capacity broadband pipes to the user. Perhaps there are ways to avoid an either-or choice, but I’d suggest that the development of the Internet has rested at least as much on openness as on bandwidth.

There’s an interesting discussion thread on this topic on Dave Farbers Interesting People list.