Until everywhere has fiber to the curb, the internet backbone is going to be orders of magnitude faster than the last-mile speeds

At which point, the demand for bandwidth will go up, and the internet backbone will have to grow, and it will still be orders of magnitude greater than last mile speeds. Internet backbone will always be faster than last mile speeds by necessity.

Fair point. It will be interesting to see in what areas the demand for bandwidth will go up. At some point doubling resolution is no longer noticeable.

Games with massive textures (retina?), streaming lossless music, 1080p / 4k &&|| 3D 'netflix'?

Bandwidth will always get used up. "64k is enough"...LOL.