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Same reason justified 2400 and 1.4K baud modems. Nobody needed DSL (1400K and 3000K) in 1990 because advance technology 2.4K modems were fast enough.
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Nobody said that. Literally nobody.
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We're in a different place, now from when merely boosting speeds would lead to different ways to use that speed. Right now we're in an innovation gap because, other than streaming bigger and more high resolution video, nobody can figure out any interesting productive way to use all the bandwidth people have right now.
Can you think of something? I ike how you picked the year of the founding of the Cellar. In 1990 we had all sorts of things we wanted to transmit over the networks we had, but couldn't because there just wasn't that kind of capability. We sat in garages with our BBSes with hard drives full of text files and low-resolution porn, our Usenet full of conversations like this one, and we tried vainly to figure out ways to share it all. We used up every bit of bandwidth we had and demanded modem upgrades every year.
Now we're right at the point where we can stream an entire Hollywood movie at resolutions not even available to us until 10 years ago. Full video resolution will be the only thing to push the envelope in the future. Can you think of anything else you need
more bandwidth to do? Not right now! It's fine to just say "Oh we need that speed for next generation applications we haven't thought of yet." But really, at every time in the past, we were actually angry that our bandwidth requirements weren't met.
Lower latency will be the future. That is what will allow us to make music together, perform remote surgery, and do battle on realistic play battlefields. We have enough lanes, now we need a faster speed limit.