We Need Capacity to Deliver One Two-Way HD Video Per Person

So you want to know where we should be going as a country in terms of having sufficient broadband capacity? Here's a simple way of thinking about things:

We need at least enough broadband to simultaneously support at least one two-way HD video stream per person.

Now let's unpack that a bit.

First off, let's acknowledge that "HD video" is not necessarily a hard number. There are people streaming video as low as 1.5Mbps and calling it HD, a Blu-ray disc with 1080p video is delivering it at roughly 50Mbps, and an uncompressed HD video can require upwards of 500Mbps. So these numbers will be mutable based on how high we want to set the HD bar.

Secondly, it's important that this goal be symmetrical as we don't want a country that only uses broadband to watch video; we also want them to be able to send video so they can participate in videocalls and share their video with the world.

Thirdly, we need networks that can support simultaneous usage. We want everyone in a household, in a neighborhood, in a city to be able to turn on a camera at the same time, whether for different purposes, where one person's using telemedicine in one room and someone else distance learning in another, or the same purpose, like communicating during an emergency.

Fourthly, I'm starting with one two-way HD stream per person as that's all we can reasonably pay attention to at a time, but ultimately we will want enough capacity to support multiple simultaneous HD streams per person so that we can have security cameras, baby monitoring cameras, and personal videocalling cameras all running at the same time as we're watching TV and uploading videos to others. But for now everyone being able to turn on to watch and/or send one HD video stream is a good first practical goal.

So let's start by using 10Mbps as our definition of HD. With compression that'll allow for truly high quality video to be delivered that will look good on an HDTV.

Then let's take the average household size of 2.5 people. That shows us we need at least 25Mbps symmetrical per household.

And what about for the households of larger families? My family growing up had five people in it, so we'd have needed at least 50Mbps. And if grandma had moved in that would mean our needs would go up to 60Mbps.

Now let's take this a step further. What about a building with lots of people in it? Imagine an office building or a school or a hospital or a library. A workplace with 100 people in it will need 1Gbps; one with 1,000 people will require 10Gbps of symmetrical simultaneous bandwidth.

So here we have it a simple near-term goal: enough capacity to simultaneously deliver one two-way HD video for every person at their home or work.

Notice how I said "near-term goal."

The reason for this is that while the Internet we have today can't support true HD video delivery, HD isn't the endgame. As I've mentioned before, there's something called UltraHD video, which has sixteen times the resolution of HD, enabling near 3D-like experiences without any funny glasses. To deliver one of these UltraHD videos even with a ton of compression requires 120Mbps. So basically multiply all the numbers above by ten and you can see the kind of bandwidth we'll need five years from now.

These are the kind of clear, pragmatic goals we need to guide our broadband policy-making moving forward so that we can insure we're getting Americans the kind of broadband they need to take full advantage of living in a networked world.