[betterunix]

"To strike a contrarian tone, how much is this going to matter a handful of years from now as the internet at large and bandwidth to the home continues to increase?"

Who will enjoy the benefits of the increase? If you are only getting 9.6kbaud unless you pay millions of dollars in fees to every ISP between you and your peers, then all that bandwidth is useless to you.

"In a decade is it unreasonable to expect that "really fast" home internet is 1 gigbit?"

One gigabit to Youtube, unless you are on a Comcast connection in which case it is 1 megabit for Youtube and a gigabit to NBC's streaming service, and 256 kilobits for anything else.

"Does this make it harder for Netflix"

Oh you wanted to have access to Netflix? Well that will be $300/per gigabyte for a business line that has real Internet access. For a mere $20/month, you can have unlimited access to the best of Comcast, now partnered with Microsoft!!!