[bane]

The interesting bit is that I'm not sure in many cases it matters.

I'm lucky to have FiOS (25down/5up), and I have many times the bandwidth I can manage. I can be downloading a couple torrents, my wife and I can both be streaming a movie, our phones can both be updating, I can forget I left Pandora running, and a friend can be in another room doing goodness knows what, and web sites still load more or less the same as normal.

I'd don't think I've ever come close to saturating my connection mainly because the sites I'm connecting to...even major sites...can't serve me data fast enough. For example, I routinely wait for youtube to buffer (though oddly 720p appears to load faster and more smoothly than any other resolution)...often I'll watch something on hulu while a videoclip buffers on youtube.

I've been on 100mbps connections in East Asia and didn't notice any perceptible difference...I did about the same amount of stuff in about the same amount of time...the sites I was connected to simply weren't servicing me any faster.

[asharp]

Please note that most of the bw in Asia is to other parts of Asia. There is lots of peering and lots of fibre. Trying to get to the US, on the other hand, and you have a few, very expensive (comparatively) cables. This is why you find cloud companies in korea doing live disk replication into japan. The fibre in the region is just so cheap that it just doesn't matter anymore.

You would probably notice that if you were using local (or even localish) sites, that there would be a dramatic improvement.

[shmageggy]

Unfortunately, due to the duopolies described in the article, most of the rest of us are stuck dreaming of such a fibery heaven. Verizon has said explicitly that they won't be coming to my area. Ever.

[bane]

I should have probably been more clear. There are consumer level DSL and cable connections that are >5mbps. Except for very very heavy usage, I doubt that somebody on a ~5mbps connection would see an appreciably different Internet than I do.

Or look at it another way, I wouldn't consider it a major penalty to move someplace without FiOS and "only" a 5mbps connection. My day job has 2 paired T-1s and I only notice a slight slowness compared to my fiber home connection.

Either way, I wait about as long for a youtube video to queue up, and I can watch hulu without problems in the meantime. I supposed it'd really matter if I wanted to stream 1080p HD. But there's really not a ton of that sort of content on the web anyway that's streamable.