Technically under a gigabit, and the same is true almost up to 4 streams, but that's just copy time. Once it's there, the bandwidth between storage and instances would easily meet that requirement, then all you need transferred back to your end is the current image / audio.

...so you're seriously advocating a workflow where I'm reliant on "the cloud" for monitoring and editing 4k video? Now you're just being ludicrous.

but I'm just speculating about the future for fun right now.

No, you're wishing and presenting it as fact in order to argue that you have a leg to stand on. You don't. if gigabit ethernet isn't fast enough for data transport for what I do, there will be no WAN fast enough for the foreseeable future. A T3 is 4mbit. You're stating that somehow 1Gbit is going to happen at a pedestrian level... all so that I can put my 10TB per movie on someone else's server.

16 GB of RAM for video editing / compositing (Not trying to talk down, just unsure if the "video" prefix is applicable or redundant to the latter).

You misunderstand me. I know what compositing is. I'm arguing what 16GB has to do with it. You're now arguing for RAM on an individual machine, while my argument has been (and has been clarified three times now) that the issue is even with the skookum fast machine in the sky, the pipe betwixt here and there cannot be made fast enough on an internet backbone.

Just to drive home a point, I've got 20GB of RAM and it isn't enough. 64-bit workflows allow RAM caching and my next machine will probably have 64GB or more.

And I don't do video.