If I were to summarize the most important message from Day 1 of the Freedom to Connect conference down in Washington DC yesterday, it was the need for more bandwidth.

One speaker said that between the number of emails he was receiving and the size of the emails due to attachments, the bandwidth that he was using had increased eight-fold while his bandwidth had only doubled. This is probably compounded by the number of people on home networks growing rapidly as well. It was said that we have dropped from number one in broadband to around 20th, and there is no indication of the slide stopping.

Folks from Speed Matters pointed out that the definition of high speed is too slow. On the chat, one person quoted this article:

“This year, the average broadband speed will increase to 75Mbps per second,” Dr Chin Dae-Je, South Korea’s Information Minister, told a delegation of global policy leaders at a meeting of the OECD earlier this year, before adding: “I have 100Mbps in my home.”