TABLE OF CONTENTS As early as 1985, the concept of broadband was already well established throughout the telecommunications industry, and was often applied to any service that needed 140 Mbit/s of bandwidth or more, though it soon came to mean a few tens of Mbit/s upwards. Anything less than 2 Mbit/s was definitely considered to be narrowband and 2-30 Mbit/s was called mid-band. That was mainly because video then needed 140 Mbit/s to get good quality, but video delivery was seen as very achievable in spite of its huge bandwidth appetite. Several systems were designed to carry tens of gigabits per second over local networks so that each customer could have over 140 Mbit/s. In the late 1980s, some high-density wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) systems were designed with the potential to deliver 2 Gbit/s to each home.
Later, some simple calculations, based on retinal cell performance characteristics, showed that 2 Gbit/s was the highest data rate that the human body's senses could handle. The ultimate broadband network would provide several channels of this capacity to each home to offer full sensory capacity to each home member and a few electronic devices. Even with a total access rate of around 10 Gbit/s, many telecommunications engineers felt confident that they could engineer such rates into networks by the late 1990s or even earlier. Yet, fifteen years on, we still do not have the 10 Gbit/s to each home that we had hoped for, anywhere in the world. Broadband today has...
