What's the fastest legal use of the Internet?

I rediscovered an curious Tweet from 2012:

Interesting that Arqiva point out that fastest legal use of Internet probably only requires 2.5MBPs. Reliability key #commsreview

— adam kinsley (@adamkinsley) July 4, 2012

That was a reasonable - if incorrect - assumption at the start of the decade. Streaming TV was in its infancy, and it was ridiculous to suggest that people might want to broadcast from home.

But now... Netflix expects around 25Mbps for its HD video. Google's Stadia gaming service wants 35Mbps. A family of 4, all using different devices, now needs more than 100Mbps.

When I buy a new video game, it immediately requires a multi-gigabyte patch to download. There is no speed too fast for me!

Parkinson’s Law states

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

Well, it should be patently obvious that Internet activity expands so as to saturate the current bandwidth.

That's partly because there are some things you simply can't do until there is sufficient bandwidth. Anyone who remembers RealPlayer's continual "Buffering" knows that streaming video was a cruel joke in the dial-up era.

What is "Legal"?

The implicit argument in Arqiva's statement was that only dirty, nasty pirates need high-bandwidth for all the highly-illegal torrents they're... errr... torrenting.

We're beyond that now.

If I want to stream my life to millions of fans - or just HD video from my doorbell - why shouldn't my home broadband support that?

When my doctor wants to remote control an 8K VR surgical robot to operate on me, I don't want my ISP deciding I don't need that sort of speed.

We need to move away from the argument that there's a maximum speed that the industry needs to deliver, and then we'll all be satisfied.

The faster things go, the more amazing things we can do.