[XorNot]

It's what can you do with a 40 mbps upload speed that you can't do with 1mbps?

Which is, you know - a lot. In the age of user created content, telecommuting and cloud services being unable to upload faster then 128 kilobytes per second is a killer.

If you're dealing with any type of multimedia content you can be needing to move 10-20 megabytes per cycle between a few people with ease - that time adds up, and it constrains how you work.

[joezydeco]

How much upstream bandwidth is coming from servers and multimedia producers in residences, and how much is coming from mobile devices?

[XorNot]

802.11n in your house is 100mbit.

Mobile devices have been used as misdirection throughout the NBN debate, because very few people are uploading large YouTube videos from their smartphones over 3G and for anything that's got some level of production to it they'll be working on it on laptops and desktops at home and the like.

[joezydeco]

So the future of Australia's economy, and the reason that an entire continent should be wired with FTTH, hinges on citizens being to efficiently upload to YouTube from their homes?

[XorNot]

Yes. Clearly no value of any sort has ever been created from the digital economy, and the richest companies in the world definitely produce nothing to do with content creation and distribution over the internet.

[joezydeco]

But this "raging" is over the fact that your passenger jet can only do Mach 0.75, not Mach 0.85? In the big picture, a hell of a lot can be done with 25 mbit and at this point in history you're hitting diminishing returns by jumping another order of magnitude.

Maybe in the future we'll all need 1 gbit backbones, but not today.

[XorNot]

But we can't do 25mbit. 25mbit today is the extreme upper end that you never achieve. My household connection can do about 12mbit. I can't buy a faster service even if I want to, I'd have to literally buy a commercial building in the CBD to get that type of access. And the upload speeds on that will never exceed 1mbit a second.

If we were talking about enabling everyone to buy say, 10/10 or 20/20 symmetric service then I would not particularly care - in fact a lot of people advocating for FTTH would be placated. But it is not possible to do that with current infrastructure because current infrastructure sucks. Symmetric DSL tops out at 2/2 for about $600 a month.