i am from austria and i currently have a 6 mbit connection, due to old cables in my house, but i dont really miss a fast connection as i can do anything i want on the internet, like Facebook, League of legends, world of Warcraft, 1080p youtube videos and surfing in general
The only benefit i would see in having a gigabit connection would be faster donwloading times of patches and games from steam, but i can download them the in the background now, which doesnt bother me too much
I personally would compare a gigabit connection with good water pressure in the shower - nice to have but not really that important
Could you make a video on why someone would want to have a Gigabit connection?
Streaming on twitch is one reason I can think of. Downloading stuff faster, concurrent downloads(possibly from more than one person in the house) servers if the contract permits, HD video calling. Just to name a few
Gigabit internet also opens the door for collaborations like when someone shoots a video and wants to send the raw captures to the editor without it taking 8 hours to transfer...
The biggest bottleneck on in my set up is internet speed right now. 25Mb down/3Mb up is good, but doesn't even come close to the speed your average HDD is capable of, let alone an SSD. At 1Gb you're looking at 128MB, which would be stressing said average HDD to the max.
Of course there are other reasons like Phantom mentioned, but I like having no bottlenecks over all those reasons haha.
Who the what the when the where the why the FUCK?!
I think a better question would be "Why would you NOT want Gigabit internet?" If I came to you with two options (your current connection for $40 per month or a gigabit connection for $40 per month), would you honestly choose the slower connection simply because "it's good enough?" In my opinion, this doesn't really constitute a valid reason. I think people need to let go of that "it's good enough" notion. It introduces a dangerous amount of complacency in our society.
A faster internet paves the way for endless possibilities and opportunities.
I live in Australia as well and 3 years ago was still on the 56k speeds watching the images slowly load on the web pages. And I am now on a connection that is about 6Mbit as well and I agree with you partly that most people can probably get by fine with a connection speed of about 20Mbit and don't really need the Giga bit connection speed. I think really what the internet needs is for more web sites and web developers working smarted to setup their caching correctly and resizing and setting the format on images and videos correctly and using better compression on files for downloads.
I do think that having faster internet in the future could mean that we could have new reasons come about that would mean we would need those faster speeds but I would hope that we also continue to created new and different methods of compressing that traffic so that really we don't ever need to have a Giga bit connection.
That all said I do think we need to upgrade the Australian network to fibre optic cables to the home like the original NBN plan was for, and I will try to explain why.
The advantage of fibre optics is that to upgrade the connection in the future we don't have to upgrade the cables we just upgrade the sensors at the end of the fibre, by upgrading the sensor at the end of the fibre you can add a sensor that can detect or send more changes in colors or brightness or speed of the pulses of light and this will increase the speed of your connection. We can't do that with the copper lines that we have at the moment.
The issue with the new NBN plan to just upgrade the connections to the Node in the street is that by only upgrading to that point you are still slowed down by the copper cable in-between your house and that node and so the copper cable is still the bottle neck. The other issue is that to upgrade the connection to your house latter when maybe you do want the faster Giga bit speeds is alot more expensive than just upgrading all the connections at once. When you upgrade the connection all at once like in the first NBN plan you have the team that does the upgrades in the area at the same time working on the rest of the infrastructure, you put in new fibre optic switches in the Node and don't have to worry about fibre to copper switches.
Fibre optic connections should also help to reduce lag in the connection and reduce the packet jitter that we have with the copper network which will reduce the delay you might notice when you are on a video call.
I would also say that there are alot of people that will use Giga bit connections and could use them now if the infrastructure was upgraded. for things like working from home but still being able to video conference and run applications remotely. I work in IT and at work I can easily transfer 50 to 100 Gigs of data in-between site in a day, and alot of the people I work with that do live in cities where they can get fast internet do work from home already. They also do similar things for hospitals to allow specialist to be able to view patients or review scans through the internet. And some areas I would expect faster internet to help would be with aiged care and disability care, we actually already have connected devices that can tell health care workers if an elderly person has fallen over and panic buttons that work over the internet that are helping people stay in there homes longer instead of needing to go into nursing homes. If we can get faster internet we should be able to get more devices with web cameras and sound built into things like this.
Faster internet would also give us more possibilities with using cloud applications where we store files in the cloud on services like drop box.
If you don't have a big network, I find that anything over 50 Mbit is ok. For anything other than torrents and big downloads the difference between 50 - 100 - 500 Mbit is not that visible in real life (browsing, gaming).
I have a 500/100 Mbit (D/U) line at home. It's great. I usually get 40-45 MB/s while downloading torrents. But for usual tasks I can't tell the difference between my 500 Mbit home line, the 1 Gbit line (actual fiber line connected to a GPON ONT) I have at the office and the 50 Mbit link my parents have. Even on the 50 Mbit one you can watch two 1080p streams on two PCs or torrent on one, while streaming on the other.
Of course, depending on what you need the bandwidth for (and how many PCs you have on your network) your mileage may vary.
I don't remember when 56k was "enough"... I do, however, remember when it was all that was available without paying $100/m for internet, however...
NetZero made the slothness tolerable... cause yano... it was free, but 56k was never "enough" unless all you did was browse AOL chat rooms (which you could overload the connection to time out by mass posting macros)...
I think it is pretty obvious why 6 mbps isn't enough. Media consumption is changing. We used to live in the world where everyone got their entertainment from television. For most of my childhood my family only had one television, and dial up. That meant that the bandwidth coming into our home really only needed to be capable of one standard definition channel. Now we live in a world where a lot of the media consumption takes place online through websites like youtube and netflix, and everyone wants to be able to watch what they want, when they want. Imagine the not so distant future for a moment. 4k tv's will be very common and most of them support netflix and youtube functionality. Imagine the bandwidth you would need to stream your 4k youtube video in the living room while little Timmy is downloading call of duty 49 (which will be 1TB at the rate things are going, seriously...) and little Sally is trying to skype with your wife/husband who is away on business with her new 4k webcam. You don't have to be a technology enthusiast to appreciate the benefits of increased bandwidth.
The internet is our new means of media consumption. Television is dying and the cable companies know it. That is why with Comcast only offers their top tier internet service with a bundle that includes a ton of HD channels you will never watch. BTW, how can you stream 1080p (8mbps) youtube with a 6mbps connection? That would be a lot of buffering, especially for a longer video even assuming your ISP doesn't throttle youtube like American ISP's do, not to mention it would render the internet for anyone else on your connection virtually useless.