"I can saturate a 100mbps connection by booting a diskless computer. Why shouldn't our operating systems/environments be stored "in the cloud"?"

Clouds go down, your computer goes down. There's no compelling reason to put the OS "in the cloud". Your data? Maybe, if you can handle not having access to it every second of the day. And even today, one can RDP or VNC perfectly comfortably on a 20Mbps connection provided all the "cloudy" parts of the internet behave. More importantly, if the server and the links between you and the server aren't capable of giving you 100mbps then you can't saturate the connection.

"Why shouldn't I have more than one computer in my house?"

How does not having a 1Gbps internet connection prevent this?

"Remind me again why I can't have cameras all over my house and see them all at once while somewhere else."

Why can't you do that today? Streaming 1080p from x-number of cameras, multiplexed into a single display that's probably no better than 1080p is silly. The proper approach, regardless of bandwidth, is to downsample the displays before multiplexing at the broadcast side. Then you're just streaming a single video stream anyways, which is perfectly doable at 20Mbps.

"Why shouldn't I be able to speak to an SO wondering around the house doing chores while I'm in a hotel room?"

Again, why can't you do that today? There's no reason to stream video from empty parts of the house. In your use-case, you're only sending one or two video streams at a time anyway...again still healthily within the realm of 20Mpbs.

"All that aside, think of the games and entertainment that can be enabled. TVs are large enough to be almost life size now. Why shouldn't I be able to stand in front of one with a doctor or Amazon employee on the other side being able to examine each other, products, packaging etc in high resolution detail. (Note 1080 is not even close to high resolution for life size.)"

This is the only compelling case you've provided I think, but bandwidth is not the principle problem in this use-case. Everything from cameras to encoders to compressors to display devices are a bigger problem in this case.

And yes, you'll have to compress even at 1gbps. A 1920x1080 display with 24bit color at 60fps is something like 3GigaBytes per second or around 24gbps.

The next gen of TV is likely to be some variant of super hi-vision which is 7680x4320. @24bit and 60fps that's just shy of 48Gigabytes per second uncompressed or 384gbps.

So yeah, bandwidth will be a bottleneck in those applications, but 1gbps is not even close to handling it and I'm guessing the hardware required to real-time encode and compress video for a stream like that is astronomical.

So what? How much useful stuff do you think I can actually do at the computer without a net connection? (Software developers are a little different, but even then there have been projects where a net connection is required to be at all productive.)

Note that it would not be law that your OS has to be remote. Not everyone would do it. But it isn't even an option today.

> There's no compelling reason to put the OS "in the cloud"

That it becomes someone else's problem to maintain is a nice one. So that it is available to me no matter where I go is nice. So that it can be demand loaded as I use bits instead of going through a multi-hour install that installs everything despite me not using a lot of it.

> .. one can RDP or VNC perfectly comfortably ..

Only if the latency is low, and you don't do 3D graphics or anything involving large screen updates. When the process and graphics card are local, they can provide superb interactive response. (I have a long history with both protocols, and even hardware acceleration for RDP - still poor performance.)

> How does not having a 1Gbps internet connection prevent this?

I meant having more than one computer demand downloading its OS. And by computer I mean almost everything with a microprocessor.

> .. multiplexed into a single display .. downsample .. reason to stream video from empty parts of the house ..

I didn't ask "how can I compromise to fit things into little bandwidth". If I had a choice between one or two cameras at a time and low quality versus all the cameras and very high quality then I'll pick the latter.

At one time 640k was enough for everyone. You could shoe horn everything most people did into that. But when given the option of more displays, more fidelity, quicker interactive response, I'll take them every time over compromises.

> Everything from cameras to encoders to compressors to display devices are a bigger problem in this case

That is all part of the chicken and egg problem. If the bandwidth isn't widely available then there won't be that much demand. There are other encoding solutions other than full "frames" - eg deltas only for random parts of the frame updated on demand at differing rates rather than having one frame rate for the whole frame. Eye tracking can determine the area to pay most attention to.

I would say not very, while one can code without the net. The lack of libraries, documentation and other resources would make most projects a pain, if said lack extended past an hour or so. Further a lot of the software being developed, itself relies on connectivity. Now there are special focuses like embedded where it would not be as much of a pain to loose connectivity, but for 70% (I made that statistic up) of what I do as a software developer, I would probably just walk away from the machine until it regained connectivity, depending on whether I was deep in a code groove or gluing stuff together, if it's gluing then, the machine is useless without a connection.