## 4 Discussion and Conclusions  
In this study we surveyed the current state of the art in the approaches to deal with bandwidth limitations when high quality geographic information is being provided. The topic is interdisciplinary; and this survey provides only a small window to the vast literature. However, we tried to identify critical topics and approach them systematically. A most important concept related to bandwidth availability is the system responsiveness. The system responsiveness is directly linked to \"response time\" (efficiency); which is a basic metric in usability, and is measured in almost all user studies (e.g., [28, 79]). In any service that is provided online, the system response time heavily depends on bandwidth, and user's response time depends on the system response time. Increasing the bandwidth and speeding the system up in other ways such as the level of detail management or filtering will positively correlate with user performance, up to some level as illustrated in the \"inverted u-curve\". That is, we need to keep in mind that there is a point when the system can be _too fast_ for the user to process the provided information; _i.e._ when designing interaction, we have to pay attention that the changes occur in the right speed. For complex tasks, moderate waiting times can facilitate thinking [7, 8, 80]. Similarly, too little information just is not helpful for good decisions, but we can also provide _too much_ information. In both cases, the main message is that we need to take care of the cognitive limitations of humans and test our systems properly for the target audience. As we covered in this paper, there are many hardware, software, and design approaches to providing high quality geographic information such as the level of detail management and filtering techniques. Another aspect for the information providers as well as researchers to consider on this point is that the pre- or post-processing of information ideally should not be more \"expensive\" than the bandwidth related waiting times. _I.e._, if we compress a package to stream it faster, we may be pleasedwith the financial aspect as we would pay less for the data transfer, but if the mobile device that receives the package has a very small processor, we may wait just as long to decompress the data on the client side. Mobile devices have limited processing power as well as smaller screen sizes, less storage and battery problems [20]. In some user studies, perhaps not too surprisingly, people preferred desktop networking to mobile browsers [9]. However, the advantages of mobility are self-explanatory in many scenarios. Besides, in some of the poorest parts of the world where people do not have access to electricity, they can only use mobile phones to access online services. We demonstrated that even with moderately fast bit rates, geographic data can create very long waiting times. This gets amplified with the roaming charges in mobile networks--while maps are clearly much needed in unknown territories, the current price plans for international roaming makes the services prohibitively expensive and this problem should be addressed not only in collaboration with policy makers, but also with interdisciplinary science teams to find ways to provide the right amount of relevant data at the right time, preferably customized for the user. Among these ways, we provided a more in depth review of level of detail management and filtering as well as relevance approaches. Both of these topics are studied by geographic, computational as well as cognitive science communities and are fairly complex, multi-faceted topics. Despite their complexity, however, both domains are already well established and carry further promise in the future to ease the bandwidth limitations (at least) to a degree. While the bandwidth availability is directly related to user and system performance, it also has technical and socio-financial constraints.