I didn't mean to imply that this would go into effect over the weekend. It'll be quite a few years before this is all in place. The problems aren't as severe as you might think, though.



More? Yes. Exponentially more? No. You'd use bandwidth when you were using the screen, and it would be roughly equivalent to streaming a movie. So tack on a few hours more Netflix viewing for the average person, and that's about right. Maybe not even that, since bandwidth for word processing, internet, and other mostly static content would be WAY lower than bandwidth for games and video. Also, centralizing computing power would reduce a lot of other miscellaneous non-consumer bandwidth usage. All told, you might have an increase by a factor of (random guess time) two or three, but honestly, that's very doable. Bandwidth is dirt cheap and highly available, even today. Caps exist primarily for companies to make an extra buck, they're not really necessary for network health (note that this is not the case with wireless networks).



It sucks because they're still catering to the lowest common denominator. They want to make an "HD" stream available to someone with a 5mbit connection. Even today, though, the average broadband connection is faster than that. If you consider only places with fairly high population density, the average connection is MUCH faster than that. As the connection speeds increase, so will the quality of the offered streams. The nice thing is that there's no effective upper limit on the attainable internet speeds, but there is an upper limit on quality. People can't even see the difference between 1920 and 1680 on a typical computer monitor, at typical viewing distances. We won't need to increase our quality very much, and so internet speeds will definitely "catch up" when it comes to streaming.