Since the OP mentioned unlimited funding, I’ll have to speculate that it would have been possible in 2000 to have 10 Gb/s service. In the late 1990s, I was heavily involved in campus upgrades for pharma and tech companies where dedicated single-mode and multi-mode fiber was being installed between buildings. The fiber supported both data and voice services. SM fiber easily supported 10 Gb/s speeds and it was their goal to have 1 Gb/S at the desktop within a few years. Multi-mode fiber was important, but relegated to fire alarm, security video, and other basic system support functions.
The DOCSIS standards are probably not appropriate to the discussion, given that they apply strictly to data over existing and new cable systems. I think the OP is saying, “What if the DOCSIS standards for 2000 weren’t constrained by budget or ISP performance and relied only on the best/fastest available technology?”
The demand was definitely there… Tucows 1993, RealVideo 1997, Napster 1999, Bittorrent 2001, Steam 2003, YouTube 2005, and of course early porn sites… all were bandwidth hogs. But bandwidth availability and usage varied greatly between households.
The cities got faster speeds much quicker than rural areas. The FCC tried several times to inject funding for rural infra, but between corruption and incompetence and Comcast’s anti-municipal broadband lobbying, it largely went nowhere and the money just disappeared into executive pockets with nothing to show for it except thousands of miles of dark fiber that still isn’t being used much today. It took Musk to really bring high speed internet to rural areas, and that was just in the last few years.
I know that predicting the future of tech can be foolish but I get 1Gig up and down for cheap with fiber and can upgrade up to 7Gig up and down. I stream movies and surf the web and have a bunch of low use connected devices. I think even 1Gig is probably overkill for my use case which is probably the use case for 99% of people.
What in the future might require a typical household to need more speed?
They said the same thing when 768kbit DSL was cutting edge, so like the 640k quote, that question can age badly. The obvious response, is “yeah, but 7G? Come on, my enterprise file server is only 10G!”
The capitalist response is going to be something about subscription streaming AI, subscription streaming games, subscription streaming smart thermostats, subscription streaming AI ovens, subscription 4k security cameras. They’re building gigawatts of datacenters, and they have to send all that data someplace after they make it.
The more serious answers are things like working from home with the same network speed as if you’re at corporate headquarters (not that corporate headquarters has on-prem servers anyway).
At some point it does probably get to be “enough,” because unless you’re using MPI[1] in some geographically distributed super computer, what do you need it for?
parallel computing with shared memory across nodes ↩︎
I’d pay for multi gig today if it were available here, just for downloading games (hundreds of gigs) and uploading videos. Max here is 1 GB down (which is really more like 400 to 500 most days) and 25 up. The asymmetric upload sucks.
When internet speeds and DOCSIS improve, it doesn’t happen everywhere all at once. 7 gig elsewhere might mean we finally get 2 gig here, for example.
Yeah I came here to post about that. They were planning the rollout in 2010 and in 2012 they brought google fiber to Kansas city.
My recollection was their goal was to shame internet providers into offering better speeds.
Currently I’m getting 400Mbps from cable, but there are 1Gbps fiber providers where I live. However it took about a decade after Google fiber before I had those options.
I’m sure they will invent something. Supply can lead to demand just like demand can lead to supply.
For me, like I said I have 400Mbps. The only times I use it is when I’m downloading videos or video games. For day to day activities I never use anywhere near that much. Even 4K streaming only takes up about 25 Mbps.
However if you have a family of 5 and multiple people are working from home, streaming and downloading games/videos at the same time, it could be helpful to have that ceiling.
One thing about WFH is that if you have to log in through a VPN, it throttles your speeds. Like even though I can get 400 Mbps from my home internet, when I go through my work VPN it slows that down to maybe 30 Mbps. So that may be a factor.
My friend’s father was getting a very nice new house constructed in 2002-ish. My friend being the techie in the family was asked by his dad what he should do to make it future proof. His advice was to get the whole place wired with CAT-5 and put an ethernet port in every place where he was already putting an electrical outlet.
I mean, it’s not a necessity if wi-fi already works fine for you. But cables are cheap (if you install them during construction instead of adding them later) and it can make the internet MUCH more reliable in bigger houses.
Wi-fi is good for basic web browsing, but can often start to struggle when multiple people in the home start streaming 4k videos, playing games, downloading and uploading big files, etc. together. Having ethernet outlets everywhere lets you either hardwire individual computers/TVs/game consoles directly, or else lets you at least use that as the wired backhaul for mesh wi-fi nodes (making them faster and more reliable, since they don’t have to use a laggy wireless backhaul).
A even more niche use is that modern setups also allow power-over-ethernet to power some connected smart devices like security cameras, smart speakers, etc.
Admittedly it’s certainly not something everyone needs, but it’s a nice “why not” for any data-intensive households. I certainly wish I had that where I live (as a renter)… because I don’t, I’ve had to spend hundreds of dollars and many hours trying to work around wifi limitations here and trying to get acceptable bandwidth for gaming and videos in different parts of the house.
We were on ISDN, 128K, in 2000. We could have upgraded to Fibre around then, or a little later, and it would have been so much cheaper we could have paid it off in ~4 years.
There were only a couple of fibre channels connecting Aus to the USA or the EU at that time, so if /everybody/ had installed fibre, we wouldn’t have been able to get fibre speed to most of the internet.
Then ADSL happened, and the price of 128K internet dropped so low that fibre became comparatively expensive.
Ethernet is a short-haul connection. It is not, and was not, a solution for inter-network connections. We could have paid for an Ethernet service from a provider, which actually would have gone over the phone company connection-oriented packet network, sort of the same way ADSL enabled you to connect ethernet to an ADSL modem, but provider ethernet was, and is, a very high-cost service that doesn’t actually use ethernet.
Also, although I could have bought a high-cost short-haul unswitched double-twisted pair connection, and used it for low-speed ethernet, between two very close sites, for technical reasons that wouldn’t have been possible for general use from multiple homes or offices: there would have been too much cross-talk.
At the same time, people at the dawn of the concorde age were predicting 30 minute rocket powered flights anywhere on the globe by the 2020s. In actuality, flights today are about 10% slower than the 1970s to save on fuel.
What uses up 80% of the bandwidth in 2026 is what people predicted in 2000: Streaming video. We’ve largely hit the max when it comes to resolution, frame rate and color space. 4K is “good enough” for 99% of people, we’ve again gone backwards from 48, 60 & 120fps experiments back to good old 24 & 30 fps & there’s currently a shift towards HDR video that’s 80% complete at this point. This is roughly about 20Mbps of bandwidth per stream and we’re seeing real consumer hesitation over upgrading anywhere past 1Gbps because that’s perceived as “good enough” for all but extreme power users. The first macs had gigabit ethernet in 2001 and most machines today still ship with gigabit ethernet, only a niche of specialty hardware comes with built in 2.5, 5 or 10G ethernet.
Currently this is true. I have around 700 Mbps down and I really don’t need it. Typically server access speeds and/or the internet path are going to be less than that, usually much less. Streaming services like Netflix work fine for me, but my own WiFi is probably the limiting factor there. The only computer that actually gets 700 Mbps is the desktop that’s directly wired with Gigabit Ethernet.
I don’t know, but remember when “nobody will ever need more than 640K [of RAM]”? Technology advances, sometimes in unexpected ways. I still remember downloading video games back in the day, and one time it was a real monster download – the full capacity of a 3.5 inch floppy disk – 1.44 MB! Downloading nearly one and a half megabytes was an overnight operation! Today over typical broadband speeds it would be virtually instantaneous – you wouldn’t even notice it.
That particular quote supposedly by Bill Gates is a myth but the sentiment certainly existed. When I first started working in the disk drive industry 100MB disk drives were state of the art. A few years later my first big project was a 1.2GB drive. I still have the 128MB thumb drive that I got in the mid-90s. It still works! I got my first PC at home in 1993 and I had to get a new one every two or three years. Now I keep laptops for like seven years and normally something mechanical fails before the specs aren’t good enough for my usage. Things have plateaued.
I’m more in @Shalmanese 's camp on this issue. I’ve had fiber now for over a year and it’s amazing. I just did a test and got 933/941 next to the router and 579/532 clear across the house. I have around fifteen WiFi enabled devices (not all active at the same time). I may add a few more over the years but I don’t see any tech coming that will require a significant amount of bandwidth. I never said something like that through the 90s and 00s.
That’s some quality Star Trek level technobabble right there.
Regarding the question of what home users could possibly need so much bandwidth for, I have one good example. In the past 2-3 years my cable internet was upgraded from 100 x 10 mbit to 300 x 300 to 400 x 400. The huge improvement in upstream bandwidth finally let me sign up for cloud backup of my home computer. I’ve accumulated roughly 20 TB of data over the years, mostly photos, and there’s no way I could back that up over a 10 mbit upstream connection. Even more typical home users with lesser bandwidth would feel the pain of a days/weeks long first upload since saturating that side of the connection also degrades the downstream too.
I was asking why someone would need more than 1000x1000 or even the 7000x7000 which is the maximum available from my fiber provider. It’s clear why someone would need 500x500.
