Now that 4K monitors and TVs are on the verge of a popularity explosion, I have to look back and laugh at all the people (geeks included) who absolutely assured me 5-6 years ago that we’d never need more than 3-4Mbs of bandwidth for home use.

That that was enough for anyone. That anything else was just ridiculous and wasteful extravagance.

A 4K stream not compressed all to hell requires about 15Mbs.

Of course these naysayers weren’t everyone, but a significant minority or my guess is a small majority.

They remind me people on BBSes back in the day moaning and complaining when 800×600 and 1024×768 monitors started coming out (in the time where 640×480 was HUGE) that no one would ever, ever need such a huge screen and it just made computers slower and blah blah blah….

Next will be 3-D and VR, which will happen in the next 5-15 years. It’ll require 10-100x the bandwidth, which many will insist we “don’t need.”

Until we do.

Of course this ignores the fact that having an at-first “purposeless” higher resolution and higher bandwidth is what allows innovation to happen (which is why the cable companies oppose upgrading their networks).

Many people are persistently, stubbornly short-sighted.