As the latest news from Web optimizator Andy King points out, not everyone shares your high speed connection -- US broadband penetration is slowing down (only at 44% right now), and that means that we live in a half-n-half world of high and low speed Internet users:
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0607/
On the plus side, “active“ US Web surfers on broadband account for over 70% of traffic.
However, even these users can experience local high speed bottlenecks (hey, get the neighbors off their cable modems -- I'm crawlin' over here) or bottlenecks in your own Web delivery process as Web sites and apps get more complex, AJAX-ified, video-laden, etc.
Long story short -- the optical or quantum wireless Internet 4.0 ain't going to be here for a while, so supe up your Web servers with compression, cache control, code optimization, caching, pre-generation, DB query and access optimization, load balancing, CDNs -- and keep on looking for new strategies to send less data, less often to deliver the best Internet experience/functionality possible for all tiers of users.
- Port80
PS: httpZip 3.6 has been released after 6 months of speed tuning in Port80's labs and some of our largest customer deployments, and the new CacheRight 3.0 is coming out very soon...