Justified.

But beyond work - the ability to download any game from steam within 10-15 minutes max is amazing. I play online games with friends twice a week and sometimes we decide what to play that evening spontaneously - and being able to download a 100GB game and play it the same evening is a game changer(pardon the pun).

edit: in case it's not clear, when every other new game from major publisher starts at 50GB or 100GB and can sometimes be 300+GB, waiting 2hrs to download it is terrible and horrible for energy use.

Yes, your overall usage of gigabit is only a few percent. It's way oversold anyway, so you could never use all of that. It's still way worth it for those short bursts of speed.

You could argue that waiting an hour once a month is not that much of a hurdle, sure, but in my judgement it is. I like this. I wish it could go even faster. I'm so happy that the era of waiting a substantial amount of time for data transfer is just ~not a thing anymore.

Though a gigabit subscription here is dirt cheap and always has been, so that helps too.

Recently went from a 500mbps line + wifi bridge (~ +2ms, 1.5gbps throughput on wifi) to a 1.6gig line with wired 2.5gig and was surprised that it made a noticeable difference in casual browsing. The numbers say it shouldn't but it did

If 30 bucks more saves me time on downloads AND every single click on browsing a bit snappier...that makes sense to me even if I don't care how many concurrent 4K streams the pipe could carry

Peak utilization (from what I know this is total bandwidth used throughout the timeline) in a fairly active household when it comes to internet is under 20% on a 200/200 connection.

Majority of the data usage goes to streaming services. With software updates/downloads being second. These two account for like 80% of the traffic or even more. Browsing is next usually.

Only a handful of times in a week will some device hit 100% (200mbps) for a brief period. This is mostly not noticeable for other devices and probably why the high bandwidth is recommended. It allows for better experience overall, not necessarily something that helps you do something faster.

I work from home and since getting gigabit, my video conferences have stopped degrading in quality right around the time the kids get home from school.

if u have lower latency <25ms & a 25Mbps .. your connection feels faster than having 100ms latency + whatever speed.

A good Openreach ISP (FTTP) however, fairly worth it on a good deal. You get more upload with more download bandwidth, so if you do lots of off-site backing up it can be very useful

I get 8ms on OpenReach vs 15ms plus on Virgin

And the most important perk: you can self-host certain parts of your infrastructure by keeping VPS or cloud-based facade for SSL termination, while back-channeling all the traffic to the actual worker machine that sits in your basement behind the NAT. By doing so, you can immensely economize on your monthly spend by reducing it N times, where N is typically ranging from 2 to 10.

P.S. Some context: I am a long time internet user who first connected in 1996 and went through every wave of infrastructural changes, starting with dial-up 33 Kb/s, then 56 Kb/s, then dorm ethernet 10 Mb/s, followed by DSL 20 Mb/s, fiber 100 Mb/s, fiber 1 Gb/s.

I’ve spent way too much time trying to solve the large file transfer problem using hybrid p2p. Check out https://payload.app/. It’s tested in controlled env for 10Gbps+ but have not been able to test that over WAN just yet. I have 10Gbit residential if someone wants to help benchmark.

Total cost was around USD 400. The result: effectively unlimited bandwidth, and, best of all, an average latency of 1ms to the internet. Do I need it? No. Do I love it? Absolutely.