It's the latency, stupid - no-one cars about bandwith.
Aliens land on a desert earth, and they find evidence that there was one some technologically advanced civilisation - there are these metal boxes everywhere, on long rivers of solidified lava, clearly designed to move to and fro at great speed - looking further, the aliens find libraries (all with the name BLOCKBUSTER outside) and try to decode the magnetic tapes they find there, many of which feature these big metal boxes speeding too and fro and occasionally into one another.
"Look at this" they pointed out - "the boxes have messages on the front and back - it is obviously a primitive form of packet switched message networking"
"yes" replied another. "that would explain why they move so fast- the energy consumption in running this network must have been immense - perhaps that is what doomed their civilisation in the end? They never discovered that you could just send all the information over a radio, instead of driving it physically too and fro. How very sad".
