[tonyb]

This is spot on - A large majority of residential internet customers would see no difference between a 50/5 plan and a 300/30 plan. I done a significant amount of consulting in the ISP would and every time we would do mass speed increases there would be virtually no increase in aggregate traffic levels. As long as people could go to a speed test and get their subscribed speed they were happy. An HD Netflix stream takes the same amount of bandwidth no matter what your max speed is.

Most consumers aren't willing to pay the monthly cost that ISPs would be need to charge to make overbuilding fiber economically feasible. DSL providers overbuild with fiber because they can't compete with cable and the rising cost of maintenance of a copper plant. Some cable providers will do new builds with FTTH or overbuild when upgrading the existing plant is cost prohibitive. But overbuilding a working coax plant almost never makes since. Spending millions of dollars to offer higher speeds at the same price just doesn't make business sense.

[mrep]

Maybe it's a regional thing, but the comcast cable internet my parents have is absolute shit. They just upgraded from 300 to 600 and that did basically nothing (still get about 25 mbps most of the time and it occasionally now goes to 50 mbps in speed tests) and our video conferencing calls stutter all the god damn time which literally never happened back in my apartment that had fiber.