Fast enough for you?

To others, however, 100 Mb/s is not enough. “In part, I think the speed was put out there to initiate the discussion,” said Tom Garrison, communications director for the city of Egan, Minn., a supporter of the Minnesota bill calling for Gigabit speeds. “We heard from residential home-based business folks who said they could get to a Gig fairly quickly. One could argue the speed should be even more.”

Garrison, too, cited Japan and Korea as competitors. “We have an international law attorney based in Egan whose practice is worldwide,” Garrison said. “He's competing against anywhere that work could be done elsewhere.”

In a white paper two years ago, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers called on Congress to make 1 Gb/s symmetrical broadband ubiquitous, citing the need to compete with other nations but saying little about what consumers would do with that much bandwidth. A paper co-written by Gartner analyst Mark Gilbert in 2003 in support of California's “1 Gb/s or bust” initiative (whose goal was 1 Gb/s everywhere by 2010) pointed out that average desktop computing bandwidth requirements grew from less than 10 kb/s to 100 Mb/s over the past 20 years. “A similar increase applied to the FCC's 200 kb/s broadband standard results in an anticipated speed of 20 Gb/s within 20 years,” the report said. “Consequently, 1 Gb/s broadband to every education institution, business and home by 2010 is a realistic goal.”

However, the “1 Gb/s or bust” initiative has since been subsumed by Gov. Schwartzenegger's broadband task force, which no longer maintains the Gigabit goal.

“I don't think anyone could show you we'd need 1 Gb/s of bandwidth in the next fifteen years,” said Teresa Mastrangelo, senior analyst with broadbandtrends.com. “With three streams of uncompressed HDTV, you could see 60 or 70 Mb/s consumed fairly quickly. 100 Mb/s is a nice round number to put on it. But a Gig is just … out there.”

Vermont's governor is setting his sights much lower. Or rather slower. State lawmakers will likely vote in May on his proposal for 20 Mb/s of symmetric ubiquitous bandwidth by 2013. That speed was chosen in large part to allow the initiative to remain technologically agnostic. “It's great to say ‘Gigabit speeds everywhere,’ but you're setting yourself up for pretty much a fiber-only build,” said Tom Murray, Vermont's chief information officer. “We don't want to set ourselves up to discourage innovation in other technologies. I don't think anybody argues that FTTH is ideal, but I don't want to set people up for the impossible.”

For example, proponents of wireless broadband have cautioned the authors of the Vermont bill not to set blanket bandwidth requirements too high, lest they exclude wireless technologies that may otherwise be the best choice for some rural areas. “To the extent that government wants to be on the bleeding edge of technology that changes monthly, we've got to be careful,” Murray said.

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