[isatty]

I'm in the same boat as well. I'm not in the US but I do have symmetric gigabit as well. I've been using EC2/DO boxes to setup VPNs for me, but they hardly ever come close to my home speed.

This is usually due to the ec2/do instances being the cheapest or second cheapest with bad CPUs and overcrowding.

[voltagex_]

You're also only guaranteed gigabit speeds on the higher tier instances. I'd be interested in what you get using iperf3 between EC2 and your home connection.