Remember when your 14.4k baud modem was 500% faster than the standard 2400 one, and how you would never need anything faster?

That's why you have the right to complain.
(And if you don't remember, get off my lawn you damn young whippersnappers)

Hiphopopotamus

sadly the companies in Alaska will offer such a service 20 years after the other 48 states get 50Mbps and still charge an arm and a f&*'n leg for it..
Im paying $69 a month for 1Mb DSL..cable hasn't come down my street yet.

akmarksman

More, better, and faster porn than ever.

Poon

I can honestly say I will be happy with a 50Mbps connection, it will just allow me to pwn ppl in WOW with no lag.

PaleRider

Wow. I'll need to buy more Rapidshare accounts now.

I'm decent with computers and computer specs but definitely not as savvy and knowledgeable as a lot of the posters here. How is the data received? What kind of MoBo/LAN port/hard drive would you need to receive and write the data?

tuanye

Stop suggesting that blu-ray won't be around for 10 years, Toshiba fanboy.

SchruteBuck

I'd like to see the Router that thing was attached to.

MagnoliaBoy

wow wow wee waa!!

OtterKing

This is America where the need for instant gratification will never fade. I don't think you lose the right to complain about it, but your argument/complaint might lose credibility from folks who only have available to them the current consumer transfer speeds.

More is better.

Samifumi

Sure, we don't need consumer speeds that high NOW, but wait till HD video hits 4320p with completely ridiculous bitrates. Wait till movies are just 3d holograms, we'll need these data rates eventually so it certainly doesn't hurt to advance the technology now.

uber_mex

Since hard drives don't write that fast, I guess there will be an actual need for TBs of RAM pretty soon. Or faster hard drives. Whatever, I'll never be able to afford either...

nutbastard

HOLY CRAP...DO WANT!!!

Seiven

@archercc: Theres been "sleeping capacity" of fiber sitting all over where I live for 10 years.

utsava

I guess I need to go out a buy a bigger hard drive. 15 seconds for a HD movie. I am in brother.

Grifter

The only consumer level application I can see that pushes the need for faster internet connections is video. Once we reach speeds where HD video can be downloaded/streamed instantly by everyone, there will not be a significant push for more speed. The television standards world moves at a glacial pace. Didn't they start drafting up HDTV standards in the 80's? I don't see an even higher resolution TV standard becoming anywhere near mainstream for decades. What else would push speed requirements, at a consumer level, other than this?

utsava

@Cisco-Kid: No doubt. Movies will be 500GB and a song will be 400megs. We never just let sleeping capacity lie, we always find ways to utilize it.

archercc

Jesus, you're a frickin' genius. Excellent graphic!

turly

We will lose the right to complain about it as soon as all data transfer is instantaneous. That's when.

tyskkvinna

If I can download an entire HD movie in under the time it takes to transfer to a memory card or external HD, it'll be alright.

DashTheHand

Depends, do you really thing movies are going to be the largest thing you can download when that 16.4TBps is the new home connection? Streaming 3-D Virtual-reality brain-augmenting video-games with 50,000 player multiplayer death matches will probably be the new thing by then. We need the 16.4HSTIAHAOBps connection. (Holy-shit-that-is-a-huge-amount-of-bits-per-second)

Ghede

@TheAdAgency: New fanlged indeed sir! Not only that the beepmatronometer/sprectroanasyncotripiter will need a mighty fine multifrequency staging conector too!

sp00nix

So, when is the hard drive that can read/write that fast going to be available to me?

graphicwave

Awesome! Hopefully very soon I will be able to see Cameron Diaz's complexion in super ultra HD.

suburbancowboy

Crazy data transfer speeds are no good if Godzilla keeps severing the 'backbone of the internets' under the sea in the middle east...

oyumurtaci

Will this require some sort of new fangled handset for my acoustic coupler?

TheAdAgency

@Escamotage: Only for androids.

I look forward to playing Cyrsis on my 1440p TV/thin-client. They can run the game on a remote server and just pipe me the uncompressed A/V. Without lag, of course.

Brock

This will be very important for the French. It will allow them to surrender even faster if they get involved in another conflict.

meticans

@turbofc3s: I could never get it to work right on my Commodore.

Hiphopopotamus

3 seconds is a lifetime.

Escamotage

300 baud sucked.

turbofc3s

Bookmark this story for a laugh 10 years from now. Every prediction of "We'll never need XXX speed/memory/storage" has been met with applications that use and exceed those limits.

Cisco-Kid

There is no such thing as an internet connection that is "too fast". Especially when file quality and length continue to improve rapidly over time. Besides, at speeds this fast, the limiting factor will almost always be the servers you're connecting to.

Blah8

I have 30 mb down and 3.5 mb up, but the craptastic comtastic guy on the phone told me we'd have 50-100 mb down by next year. Hmmmm...

johnnyabnormal

... what's worth 50 mbps of download speed... if you can only upload at 1mbps...
they need to understand we do and ever will share files between us... we are looking for "instant transferts" .... upload speeds will NEED to follow the download speeds...

(I believe in sharing ... knowledge, music... porn .. whatever...)
(videotron user, canada) 50mbps down/1mbps up....

madlogik

Sooooooooo.... how long until Blu-Ray fizzles out now?

aec007

@Adam, I disagree with your conclusion, that at some point, enough is enough. Every stage of bandwidth acceleration breeds innovation that exploits (and relies on) the new speeds. Using current applications as a barometer, seemingly super high speeds in the future will always seem unnecessary. But once implemented, new applications will develop that would not otherwise be possible, and require those high speeds. If you build it, they will come!

It's no different that Gates' famously premature declaration that 640k of memory ought to be enough.

With new power comes new applications. Why should this ever slow down? Some postulate it won't until humans use every available resource on Earth, in the solar system, and beyond for computing.

frigg

Would the TelCo's finally stop complaining about people "pirating" their bandwidth?

A 50 M/s connection would be more than enough, but this would "widen the pipes" so to speak. Saweeeet...

ry_ry

I can get my holodeck up and running! FINALLY !

ANoel

But will my ping in BF2 go down?

Bamboo

I can already imagine my kids in front of the TV:

"Why do the HD Movies all take 3 seconds to load, that's sooo laggy!"

Klappstuhl

Zoom zoom zoom! Actually, this will come in useful someday. With hard-drives getting bigger, larger and larger files will start coming out. (Think about how in the 80's, no one ever thought they'd fill up their 6MB HD) I can certainly see how in fifteen years or so, this might not be enough. But for the time being, everyone STFU. Seriously. Most of you are torrenting movies anyway.

Khuluna

Who cares what about speeds researchers have reached while here in the good ole usa 6-8mbs is the mainstream speed. *sigh*

o0adam0o

Oh and I only pay about 30 bucks a month for it.

Cliff_Dangers

@madlogik: Here in Korea we are using the DOCSIS 3.0 standard hardware which can handle 160Mbps down and 120Mbps up. But unfortunately we are STUCK with only 100Mbps download and upload.. hehe. There is the problem with speeds in NA. They are still relying on the DOCSIS 1.0 standard.

Cliff_Dangers

Our programs and technology will evolve right along with internet connection speeds. When these speeds are available they will be necessary to run the programs that we want.

I would honestly not be concerned about fiber optics or coaxial cable though. Eventually, they will have something far faster than either of these technologies. I would be pretty happy with 50Meg though. I have a 25 Meg connection, even though it is advertised at way less than that. I guess thats what you get when you are one of the only people that get high speed through comcast in your area.

Inepsa

Yay South Africa's gonna get this at 2050! We're only like 4mbs now. But believe me the average customer is lucky to have a line or 128kb/s. Seriously we only started getting broadband 3 years ago. So sad!

DJTripleRRR

someone should tell Verizon about THE FIBER

matto

When I say I want my friggin 1080p HD3D movie NOW, I mean NOW. I didn't say 15s, I said NOW.

Bring on the ludicrous balanced optoelectronics photoreceiver and the accompanying fiber optic connection at my home, please... I mean, NOW.

Franssu

Seems they've finally hit Ludicrous Speed.

"They've gone to plaid!"

fsusmithc2

I don't know what you are talking about. We would already use that much bandwidth today. People would like to instantly download four or five movies to their laptop 5 minutes before they leave on a international trip. In the US our lack of bandwidth compared to our ability to create content that needs it has been ridiculous for the last five years. If we instantly had an infrastructure built on that technology we'd all JUST be satisfied that the internet was finally working the way it should and the way we pay for it to work now. It wouldn't be that impressive, just satisfactory.

dukemang

@Brock: Truthfully, you've just touched upon the truth of how I see technology working in the truest form.

SinAmos

well - this reminds me of when Bill Gates said that no one will use more than 512k worth of memory_

As long as computers become ever so more complex and and Operating Systems get packed with more features and get bloated and the software that runs one them gets beefed up to compensate 16Tbps will be chump change in several years_

I remember when I first upgraded from a 16.6k modem to a 56k modem and thought how that was really fast and that they'd peaked and this was only 15 years ago and now a 3Mbps connection is slow_

uberfu

Hmm... What if HD movies started being in like 17280p which would be like 8 times the quality we had now. I think people would like to stream that... lol.

ph15h

Have 100Mbit in a dorm (80% usually free) and it still takes me around 8-10minutes to download a HDrip(5-6GB), there is no need for more becase when the utorrent is using full bandwith, everything becomes verry slow beacuse of the harddrive(5400rpm) so it takes about half-a-minute just to open firefox/winamp.
But as long as the speed is fast enough to download movie faster of playback time of the movie is enough.

If you have more than 100Mbit line, considder getting aditionall computer for downloading or buy a server and start webhosting.

rrwakc

SSD WTF!

BadBoyNDSU

We're going to start getting limited by the speed of hard drives.

That said, you can never have too much speed or too much storage. The more storage you have, the more stuff you find to keep. The same thing will happen with the bandwidth.

Sqube

guess what, your broadband bill just got to you quicker than you expected.

quasimotto

@dumptruck: Who said we wanted to hear from the French here? Go use a minitel and leave us alone with your stories of 60 year old losses. The Vichy were cowards!

Skeptical_Geezer

@meticans: WW2 casualties for France were over 600,000 killed or wounded. They lost 270,000 civilians. Vous êtes un imbécile.

dumptruck

Internet bandwidth is like your income.

The more income you get the more you grow into it and thus the constant feeling that you dont have enough.

Thank goodness we are finally starting to show signs of a possible catch up to other countries regarding internet speeed. Bout time.

rainfever

How fast is fast enough? Let me humbly propose one benchmark. One HD TV stream MPEG-2 with high motion is 15-19Mb. Let's round up to 20Mb. Average number of TVs per home is 2.7. My guess is the 99% line on the normal distribution is around 6 TVs. (Only 1% of the US pop have 7 or more TVs.) If each TV is tuned to a different MPEG-2 HD IPTV channel, that would be 120Mb required. (Someone in the house could be on a VoIP call at the same time, but it would be in the noise ;-) A more serious problem would be someone downloading a video at the same time -- but it wouldn't necessarily have to be the same Quality of Service at watching a TV program. So I propose that for the next 10 years, the max bandwidth a home will need is 120Mb/s. (Newer compression technologies like MPEG-4 will reduce this.)

hfguy

There may be a time when "bandwidth so fast that it doesn't matter if it gets any faster" but we're not even close yet.

@uberfu I was gonna pull out the Bill Gates quote too but you beat me to it :)

trevorhartman