Think about this from a computing perspective. For years developers were constrained by resources and fought to keep their programs small yet functional. As time progressed, constraints eased and developers began to devour computing resources as they were made available to them. Now, years after that, we are learning that we have to try and conserve power, reduce our application foot print and stop thinking that we can declare everything as a global variable because quite frankly, not everything needs to be a global variable.

Do we need unlimited bandwidth? No
Would we like unlimited bandwidth? Yes
Is this a realistic view? Not Really.

From my time in Japan, having 100mbps bandwidth was a great experience for sharing media online.

I managed to upload hundreds of pictures to Facebook, upload 3 HD videos to Facebook, Download OpenSUSE 11.2, and surf the web pretty religiously. While I had a great time, I don’t see this as something that I would do on a nightly basis. At home, I watch a few shows on Hulu and talk to my girlfriend on Skype. Past that, there are very few things that I do that would even utilize bandwidth to the point at which I am constrained.

P2P manages to bypass the true cost of bandwidth by overusing and saturating shared broadband resources, but it’s limited by either slower upload speeds and/or it’s limited by upstream usage caps. 100 Mbps broadband services in Japan will limit upstream duty cycle to 3%.

Speaking of Universities, they’re no different there and bandwidth is primarily used for piracy with P2P. They typically end up blocking or severely throttling P2P because it makes the campus network unusable.