Logarithmic Bandwidth Goals For America's National Broadband Strategy

What should the nation's bandwidth goals be? Some say something as low as 25 Mbps is realistic. Others aspire to 1 or 100 Gpbs -- the speeds being deployed today on our nation's fastest research networks. Daily believes we should be trying to achieve 100Mbps by 2015. To use most of today's Internet you need at least 1Mbps. To use all of today's Internet you need 10Mbps, including watching "HD" video on sites like Hulu.com, which requires 7Mbps. And to be able to fully participate in the Internet of just a few years from now, where interactive HD video applications are everywhere, households will need at least 100Mbps. Then looking out further ahead, speeds of 1Gbps, 10Gbps, and 100Gbps line up perfectly with where discussions about future bandwidth goals should be set. So all that seems to be left is to associate this logarithmic growth in broadband capacity with the years we should set as goals for their widespread availability in the US. For 1Mbps, we really need to get that everywhere ASAP. In fact, if we really had our act together, I'd argue that having 1Mbps be universally available should have been a goal set for 2006 or even earlier. For 10Mbps, I'd like to be aggressive and say 2010 but some may see that as being unrealistic given that wireless technologies aren't yet delivering those speeds in the US. If that's the case then we should look at having this benchmark be set for 2011 or 2012 as an intermediary step. For 100Mbps, I didn't pull the 2015 goal out of my hat as striving to become a 100Mbps Nation by then has already been proposed by Sen. Rockefeller.