How much bandwidth do we need?

This week saw Virgin Media launch a 50mb fixed broadband service to residential customers. Apart from the high the price (£50 a month!) keeping the service out of most people’s credit-crunched budgets, it does beg the question: does anyone need that much bandwidth, and if so, what for? One of the first uses that springs to mind is P2P downloading, but interestingly Virgin Media have chosen the same week to announce that they will be throttling BitTorrent downloaders, which would really limit the usefulness of the service for such customers.

Another obvious use for a 50mb line could be HD video and IPTV, however there aren’t may IPTV services on offer to make use of this and the ones are out there are tied to multi-play bundle packages. For example, the Tiscali / Homechoice service has probably been the most successful, but requires that you to get your broadband from Tiscali, not Virgin Media, and similarly BT Vision requires a BT fixed line. What is left is a very small selection of ISP-agnostic IPTV services, such as the HD film download service on the Xbox 360. All this is of course forgetting that the vast majority of people subscribing to the 50mb service will probably already have a Virgin Media TV service already.

Avoiding the debate around technical issues such as contention, and with all things considered, what do you do on the internet that would really justify a 50mb connection? Looking at a wider question; how much bandwidth do we need? Are we at the point now where most users have enough for the foreseeable future? I say foreseeable as I’m at risk of drawing comparisons to the famous misquotes from IBM President Thomas J. Watson and Bill Gates.

No discussion about bandwidth would ever be complete without a mention of iPlayer – though according to the ISPs, the bandwidth problems with iPlayer really don’t lay in the connection to the end users, but instead with capacity limitations on the operators backhaul networks. Should the real debate about broadband connection speeds really be about backhaul capacity? Perhaps it should, but then how could you have pictures of shiny new modems in a story about that?