Vitalik Buterin warned that internet bandwidth and latency are harder to quantify than hardware, with wide regional variation and no universal benchmark

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Another more complex consideration is internet connectivity—particularly bandwidth and latency. While adequate internet performance is essential for global decentralization and resilience against censorship, setting a reasonable threshold is not straightforward. Unlike hardware, there is no standard benchmark for internet access; availability varies widely by location, and high-speed connections may simply not exist in many regions. Moreover, internet access can be disrupted more easily than physical infrastructure and is vulnerable to monopolies or overreliance on specific providers, such as satellite-based systems like Starlink. Therefore, Vitalik Buterin suggested a more conservative approach when defining bandwidth requirements compared to hardware limitations.

One tricky one to think about is internet (both bandwidth and latency). Having reasonable bandwidth and latency requirements is critical to geo-decentralization and censorship resistance, but what requirements are reasonable is more difficult to measure - there isn’t a clean equivalent of “for $30,000 you can buy an H200”. For many people in many locations, internet bandwidth above a certain speed is not available at all. Internet is also challenging to rely on because, unlike hardware, it can be easily and suddenly taken away. Finally, we do not want to become wholly dependent on one type of internet (eg. Starlink). In general, we should probably be more conservative on bandwidth than on hardware specs.