[michaelt]

Maybe my information is out-of-date but traditionally home internet connections were heavily over-subscribed - so that "10 Gbps" ISP would transfer at that speed for short bursts, but their business model relies on you averaging <100 Mbps over the course of a week. That's still enough for you to watch 24 screen-hours of 4K video per day - but the reason residential bandwidth was 99% cheaper than commercial bandwidth was that if you routinely used more than 1% they'd cut you off, throttle you, or apply traffic shaping.

[Nextgrid]

> if you routinely used more than 1% they'd cut you off, throttle you, or apply traffic shaping.

This is true, but how many projects will routinely use enough bandwidth to matter? Unless you're streaming media, very little.

Keep in mind that cloud backups, P2P/torrenting, etc also uses upstream bandwidth substantially, and ISPs have come to terms with it.

[michaelt]

For home use? You're probably right.

teruakohatu asked why a colocation facility would have a mere 10Gbps link when a 5Gbps residential links are so affordable. If you tried to run a colocation facility on a residential link, it would spend most of the time severely throttled.

[teruakohatu]

I should have clarified I am a New Zealander. We get multi-gig connections to home that are not over-subscribed, but I would be very surprised if we could saturate that over the trans-Pacific cables.