That's the maximum. Movies range from the mid teens to the mid forties for combined A/V bitrate, although most are in the 20s and 30s. That's still more than the connection most people have though.
Bitrate is something you have to watch out for in Blu-ray. You'd think the Matrix would have blazing-high bitrates to support the action, but Reloaded and Revolutions have VC-1 video encoded at less than 14 Mbps. Meanwhile, the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre gets VC-1 at slmost 30 Mbps.
And don't just trust bitrate. Blu-rays can be encoded with MPEG-2 -- the old, inefficient DVD codec. So while a lot of the IMAX Blu-rays have 40 Mpbs video, it's just effectively DVD run at a higher bitrate than the maximum 9.8 Mbps that DVD can handle. Others are really sad, such as the new Poseidon Adventure with MPEG-2 at 12 Mbps. Netflix streaming using the VC-1 codec at 6 Mbps will probably look better.
I haven’t seen very many MPEG2’s in awhile. VC-1 is getting fairly uncommon too, thankfully. The best quality is high bitrate AVC, in the upper 20’s-30’s.
It’s really not a matter of what people have for their connections. It costs more money to do more bandwidth when it comes to streaming so they have a major incentive to do what’s ‘good enough’ and no more. That’s exactly what they do, and it’s terrible compared to most Blu-rays. Like I said, with some older stuff and the higher resolution/quality doesn’t matter so much.. But anything made in the last 20 years or so, it sure does imo.