At the moment, at least definatly in England, we running on old copper phone lines installed over the last 50 years.
DSL has been a technology 'trapped' on top of it which means most of the UK can't get more than 500Kb/s.
To start getting people to watch TV online the quality will have to be better, One Stream of HDTV over the web would require 10Mb/s Connection minimum, then add someone on a voip call, browsing the web, kids playing online games, radio on, mp3's downloading and the network requirements are getting closer to 100Mb/s.
Until new networks are rolled out that are 'initially' designed to cope with massive amounts of Switched IP Traffic the real high speed internet wont arrive.
Two questions arise from this though,
1. If its possible to have 100Mb/s in your home what do you do with it and do DOS attacks get worse with compromised systems and does even more spam and rubbish get sent out?
2. If everyone had 100Mb/s to their home what kind of equipment would service providers be using.
Lets toast this agreement with the adding of chocolate to milk.
Rob