There is enough bandwidth. It is latency that is the problem. That's why stuff like streaming videos or downloading large files over hidden services works fine.
What must be done, and by who, to solve the latency issue? Can it be improved at all? It seems that more folks rnning relays and contributing bandwidth increases available bandwidth, but what can be done about latency, anything at all?
Somebody put it well on the tor-talk mailing list today:
"both the client and the hidden service establish a three hop circuit to the same tor relay, where the connections are joint, so hidden services will have even double the delay of normal tor traffic. If relays were homogeneous distributed among the globe, two random relays will be 1/4 earth circumference apart on average. This means that a round trip will have a speed of light delay of 12 hops * 10 000km each / 300 000 km/s speed of light. That's 400ms from finite speed of light. Switches, routers and relays along the way will add to that."