I understand that having access to the Internet is an important thing for numerous reasons, but why the arbitrary speeds? What benefits does a 100MB connection offer over a 1MB connection?
You can enjoy engage and benefit from the vast majority of important stuff on the Internet with a 250kb connection.
It's a marketing/political thing. Most users think that a fatter pipe == faster connection, when of course we know that's not the case. Heck, most of the time when you hit higher port speeds it's a case of the content server on the other end not being able to saturate your 100Mbit pipe anyway!
Governments promise these "minimum" speeds or "universal access" as an attempt to appear in touch with technology.
For context, the Government here in Australia has started rolling out a national fibre network (National Broadband Network; NBN), with tiered port speeds of 12/25/50/100Mbps. It's going to be a shock to many (and ISP's are going to bear the brunt of the complaints) when people realise their 50Mbit connection isn't going to give them 5-6MB/s throughput from any/every source.
It opens up the possibility of 'What shall we watch tonight? Oh we don't have that yet? I'll just grab it now. Should be done in ten minutes.' Most digital distribution services seem able to handle uploading that fast these days.
So the main uses are downloading of videos and computer games. Not life-changing, probably not worth calling a human right at this point, but pretty convenient.
The _availability_ of some level of access though does appear to be worth making universal (within the UK). Access to government services is increasingly being focussed through the WWW. This can have the effect of leaving behind those without a reasonable level of internet access available; making services for that sector of society more difficult to reach (a Trademark search say, or a check of the statute databases or ordering a book from the library or checking up on the MP or ...).
If such a disparity of available services can be readily avoided then it seems that it should be.
My parents have a 100 mbit connection and the only demanding thing they use it for is watching digital TV and sports online, and the reality is a high quality HDTV stream uses up 10-20 mbit, and if you got 3 TVs (or just a TiVo that eats 4 streams on it's own) that mandates a 50 mbit connection at least.
No not really. Streaming videos down, or streaming videos up (i.e. video chat) is harder at low speeds like that. With 250kb/sec you can consume textual content easier.