When I tell people that the target for broadband ought to be 155 megabits or better, many scoff at me, even though I have plenty of information that shows we need that much for the things we all want to be doing in less than a decade.
Unfortunately, the FCC continues to prop up the incumbent telephone and cable companies by calling broadband anything faster than 256 kilobits. This allows the incumbents to tell poorly informed elected leaders and economic developers in our communities that cable modem and DSL service offerings exceed Federal government recommendations by a wide margin, when in fact the 1-3 megabit throughput of DSL and cable modems is woefully inadequate. Not knowing anything else about the issue, many leaders decide they don't need to do anything, since the community "already has broadband."
It's video that will drive much of the bandwidth needs, and with high definition (HD) programming becoming more common, you need, depending on whom you ask, somewhere between 3-8 megabits for a single HD video stream. With the average American household having 3.68 televisions, you have to design your network to support four of those video streams simultaneously, or somewhere around 40-50 megabits/second just to watch TV. And you have to be able to handle approximately a 3x "burst" capacity when you decide to watch a video downloaded via the Internet.
But my figure of 155 megabits is still setting the bar awfully low. Our Canadian (CANARIE) friends are already doing advanced testing of immersive, multi-party videoconferencing with enhanced audio services called High Definition Ultra-Videoconferencing. The system uses 3.5 gigabits/second in each direction--or about 22 times more bandwidth than my recommendation of 155 megabits/second.
Of course, it takes an all fiber system to do this. Fiber continues to be the best futureproofing a community can undertake, as it can handle whatever bandwidth needs we want to throw at it, just by swapping out the electronics at the ends.
Wireless is a great way to start a broadband project in your community, but it's not either/or and wireless is not the end game--it's fiber, to every home and business.