Bandwidth - Is it relevent any longer?

The question was raised in my head the other day by red [redsolo.blogspot.com] in a post about JPEG compression at Coding Horror [codinghorror.com] as to how long bandwidth will be relevant.

Many believe bandwidth is already irrelevant; most people have broadband nowadays and are into streaming huge videos and downloading gigabytes of movies, they're not going to care about how big an image is.

But then I only have to think back to the beginnings of Steam and remember the uproar of people over being forced to download updates rather than being able to install them from a disc. Lot's of people it seems are unable, either due to monetary reasons (though broadband is very cheap now) or location, to get broadband and are stuck with 56k. Saying that, most web designers have written these people off and are designing exclusively for those with broadband, introducing multimedia and AJAX into their websites (both of which don't perform well at low bandwidth).

But I don't think it quite ends there. More and more people are browsing the internet from their phone. And that is the point raised by red, the compression of images mattered to his company because they needed to be able to send pictures over the slow connection of the mobile phone as fast as possible; the smaller the file the quicker it sends.

Lot's of websites now cater specifically for mobile phones and other such devices, offering smaller versions of their websites, both in terms of screen size and file size.

But my question is how long will this last? Technology is moving at quite a pace and soon we'll be able to have very high speeds even on our phones. I struggle to see what other technological leap will create a new bottleneck. Pretty soon we'll have high speed internet pretty much anywhere in the developed world on tiny devices. Once that happens, does that mean the end of bandwidth being an issue? It will be interesting to see what the next big problems will be (I would guess net neutrality).