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One of the biggest arguments that people have about watching TV over the Internet is bandwidth. Especially last mile connections. Everyone seems to think that there’s no way that we can watch HD programming over the Internet. “There’s too much buffering!” people say. Or they claim they can barely watch a YouTube video without pausing.

Well, these are arguments that worked about 10 years ago when I was working with streaming media. Today, AT&T and Verizon are delivering HD programming over a managed connection. AT&T is delivered over regular DSL lines. Verizon, of course, uses fiber, but they also are a hybrid service that still uses cable technology (QAM) to deliver live TV to subscribers. (Verizon’s VOD is IPTV based, however.)

Anyway, the reality is that last mile connections have improved dramatically since the early days. When I wrote my book on streaming media in 1998, there wasn’t much broadband at all. Dial-up was the norm. Think about it. 1998. That was pretty early. I understood the concerns then.

Today, consumers have a lot more bandwidth coming into the home. However, the U.S. is still very far behind other countries. An article from TeleCompetitor shows that the average broadband in the U.S. is 3.9 Mbps. The fastest average speed is from South Korea with 14.6 Mbps. (These numbers come from Akamai.)

Of course, Akamai only measures traffic over the open Internet. IPTV providers use closed, managed networks, so it’s hard to compare the two. Still, South Korea has a very high penetration of fiber broadband connections, which means they are ready for IPTV.

One live HD stream can be delivered in about 8 Mbps, while SD streams can be delivered in about 2 Mbps. I think MPEG-4 encoding can take it even lower, depending on encoding streams, so the last mile is critical.

The U.S. needs to catch up to the rest of the world when it comes to broadband speed. This news story from Ars Technica says that the U.S. ranks number 15 in the world for broadband speeds, and that was written in 2008. That’s too slow. Telcos and Cable providers need to work on improving this. Verizon is banking on its fiber deployments to carry it into the future. And cable companies are looking to DOCSIS 3.0 to carry broadband speeds faster.

However, fiber is still a long way off here in the U.S. Most consumers here get broadband via cable. But fiber really resonates with consumers. They understand what it means and what it can give them. But most consumers don’t even know how slow their broadband really is.