The minimum speeds to be considered “broadband” should reflect a minimum activity. For most users, the minimum activities are e-mail, online bill paying, and the occasional shopping and general browsing; neither videos nor music come into play. As such, 768/128 is certainly enough for most users now and is a speed that would attract all dial-up users if the price is right–no more than twice what they now pay for dial-up. That’s the real point: how to get dial-up users off of dial-up. Since broadband penetration is not currently pervasive to the point of providing [potential] customers with more than one alternative, none of which might be cost-effective, many will simply stick with dial-up; they don’t need “broadband” at $30 to $40 per month, if they need it at all. For my purposes, however, 1500/512 would be sufficient more than 95% of the time. Since my “sweet-spot” for Internet access pricing is about $50, that’s about how much I spend, and I want to get the most for my money. Luckily, I live in a FiOS-served area, and the 30/5 tier costs $55 per month. And it’s definitely BROADBAND.

Lastly, as has been stated, whatever is considered the minimum now will be different only two years from now, but this minimum is for most users and not the relatively few who want/need more bandwidth for music and video and downloading/uploading. The people for whom this minimum is designed aren’t even much concerned with this topic–they’re still on dial-up.

I live in Sweden where the so called broadband coverage is rather high. We do have flat rate :) The thing is that there is no problem to get 24Mbps ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line), the issue is that with 24 down and 1Mbps up the “pipe” will be filled with ack messages :( I’ve had 512/512kbps, 1mbps/512kbps, 24/1Mbps on ADSL, 8/1 Mbps on cable. Those works pretty much the same way, although ADSL generally have been more stable and having lower latency. Just recently my brother got 24/2.3Mbps ADSL and finaly it was possible to use the download speed more efficiently (not only sending ack…).

Someone said that the pipes will always be used and that is correct. Movieclips, Video On Demand (VoD) etc is getting increasingly poppular (as of today around 60% of the traffic on internet is video, by 2010 this figure is estemated to increase to 98%). In addition satellite services are starting to send in HD quality (some in 720p others 1080i) which will further increase the demeand on broadband capacity when more and more companies etc will start to compete with these satellite services….

With services, such as the ones Google provides, where you work with “thin” browser clients, storing your data on virtual drives (located on Internet) etc the demand will just increase and increase.

In addition, several companies starts to offer “Tripple play” solutions. That is; telephone, broadband, and TV via the same media, ADSL, DSL, Fiber, Cable.

Imagine when 3G with flat rate will boom as well..

That’s the difference between residential and business service. Business service is usually “committed rated” and you pay a lot more for lower access speed numbers, but you can use all of what you think you are paying for. Residential service (even FIOS) is massively under provisioned. As bad as the under provisioning is in the US, Europe is worse and Asia is much worse.

It’s like insurance. They are betting everyone won’t submit a big claim in the same year. If there is a major event (like P2P video, which can cause network storms), insurance companies are in trouble.

Yes, so there’s a point where FIOS speeds don’t help because the rest of the system is too slow. That’s why, e.g., it makes a big difference for me in speed tests whether I connect to Speakeasy’s DC server or somewhere farther away. Speakeasy’s DC server always gives me a 30 Mbps down / 5 Mbps up connection, but places with more and different hops between me are much slower.

However, there’s little that we can do to control the rest of the network. It’s still a big change to move the bottleneck from the last mile to somewhere else, more reminiscent of being in college.

From a practical standpoint, yes, there are diminishing returns to getting more bandwidth if the rest of the network and the backbone doesn’t and they can’t handle it. But I’d still rather have “enough” bandwidth and know that most slowdowns aren’t the fault of my connection.

I would say that the average speed in Europe differs a lot from country to country. In Scandinavia and France 16+ Mbps is not uncommon, whereas Germany is more in the middle with average 2 till 6 Mbps. In Eastern and South-Eastern Europe the connections are usually much slower. And: The broadband penetration in almost all parts of Europe (except Scandinavia) is lower than in the US.