[bwarp]

At the risk of sounding like a whinging old man, but do we really need 1Gbit to the home at the moment?

If you take the UK as an example, a lot of the country (outside major cities and metropolitan areas) is still stuck on 512kbit. The same is true worldwide with even parts of SA on dialup. Shouldn't we be concentrating on throwing more resources into getting these connections usable rather than feeding crazy large bandwidth to the rich?

As the broadband speeds are controlled pretty much by consumer demand, isn't it better to have more people than an elite few?

On the same subject, I'm sitting here on approximately 12Mbits and I genuinely have no problems with it streaming HD iPlayer and with three computers on it. I don't need any faster and it costs a whopping $20 a month equiv (unmetered consumption).

Also, if you consider the cost of bandwidth and caps thrown on people in Europe, a gig connection would suck up your entire allocation in about 48 seconds...

[jarito]

An interesting argument and a straw-man argument. Let's deal with the straw man first. Just because you have no use for the extra speed doesn't mean others do not. In addition, systems / uses for the speed will only be built when the number of people with access to it is growing. Therefore, there will be early adopters where the speed will gain them little initiallly, but over time we will develop more services that need it.

Now let's deal with the remote people problem. There are already efforts underway to more efficiently service outlying areas. These generally revole around WiMax and things like Lightspeed (although that looks dead for the moment). People who live far from cities will not be served as well. That's they way it will always be do to the economics of population density, hence the reason that serving those environments typically include long range wireless. Second, since when do we need to get everyone at the same level before we move forward? Would we be where we are now in personal computing if we stopped in 1996 to make sure everyone had a computer before we built faster ones? We can continue in the same way we have with universal access fees supporting access to non-city dwellers, but that's no reason to prevent progress in cities.