How much speed do we need?

As the importance of high speed internet becomes more and more evident, people have begun asking the next logical question: Just how fast should our connections be?

Ask several people and you'll get several different answers. Vermont Governor Jim Douglas has proposed guaranteeing every resident 3 Mbps of symmetrical (downstream and upstream) bandwidth by 2010, and 20 Mbps by 2013. The Fiber-to-the-Home Council (FTTH) has called on Congress to set our national goal at 100 Mbps of symmetrical bandwidth. And a bill in the Minnesota state legislature calls for 1 Gbps for all Minnesotans.

We at Speed Matters are calling for 10 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload by 2010.

Part of the reason for such a wide disparity of goals is the complete lack of a national policy for high speed internet in the United States. With virtually no direction from the top, state governments and advocacy organizations are patching together a scattered effort.

Even if everyone can't agree on an exact number, the bottom line is we need to set a goal that will keep our country competitive with the rest of the world. As Joe Savage, president of the FTTH, explains,

“100 Mb/s is perceived as the standard in most of the municipal networks in Scandinavia and is the competitive bar in France. Our call for 100 Mb/s is in part to keep us at least in the hunt with some of the other more advanced infrastructure countries around the world.”

Currently, the world leaders in fiber connections are located in Asia, where almost 10 percent of high speed internet connections are delivered over fiber optic lines. According to new market research,

Telecoms carriers in these countries, such as Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) and Korea Telecom, are investing heavily in replacing xDSL over copper infrastructure with fibre by 2011, according to research firm In-Stat.

More than 225 million people in the Asia-Pacific region will be using fibre broadband connections by 2011, In-Stat estimates, the majority of which are expected to be in new markets.

That puts Asia far ahead of the U.S., where only a tiny fraction of consumers connect over fiber lines. Progress is slow and costly, meaning most Americans will have to wait years before being able to take advantage of the latest technology.

There are already new services that require these faster connections, like HDTV over the internet and telemedicine. But even more compelling are the potential uses of fiber connections:

What would users do with 100 Mb/s or 1 Gb/s upstream? Some say distance learning. Some say telemedicine or videoconferencing. But the catchall is the “X” app: The one that hasn't been invented yet, which users will nonetheless become addicted to once they have a Gigabit going both ways. That argument was easier to dismiss before YouTube-in the year following its launch, the Web site generated more traffic than the entire Internet did in 2000.

Indeed, it's not all that difficult to imagine a household requiring a connection of 100 Mbps or more:

"When you start adding up how much bandwidth that the average home with a couple of teenagers might consume between 6 and 9 at night—two or three people watching HDTV shows, playing music from the Internet, playing online games—the bandwidth demands are going to be gigantic," says Mark Wegleitner, Verizon's chief technology officer.

In addition to these entertainment uses, more and more household devices will soon be connected to the internet. Heating and cooling systems, alarm systems, and many others will all begin to demand bandwidth.

And then there's that "'X' app," which hasn’t been developed yet. In order for that next big thing to happen, though, the infrastructure has to be there for people to take advantage of it.

Fast enough for you? (Telephony Online)

Asia leads in fibre broadband networks (Australian PC Authority)

Fiber: The only answer to the need for speed (Speed Matters)

More Bandwidth Than You Can Use? (Business Week)