I work from home, family of five and 100 is not enough.
all my tv comes over internet. three TVs, often two on at the same time. add kids with tablets, and streaming radio, teleconference and virtual desktop and 100Mbps is struggling.
Latency is the tough part, less latency matters for most interactive activities.
i work from home: 360Mbps up, 35Mbps down.
I think it's fair to say from your description that your bandwidth demands are greater than average. (Also I think you swapped your up and down, unless you've got a really strange connection.)
I have the similar usage to you. Cord cutter, four heavy smartphone/tablet users, remote desktop, etc. About a year ago a badly done patch-panel punch on my part slowed down our internet from gigabit to fast ethernet speeds. (Bad connection on one of the four pairs.) Nobody noticed.
I've got 3 gigs symmetric at my house, with 10-gige in the wall, and Ruckus APs that can do at 500+ mbps if using Apple products. I can't think of a way to use even a fraction of the bandwidth.
> 100Mbps down is fast for most people. What do you think the average user is doing that needs more than 100Mbps down?
For streaming? Sure, you'll be fine as long as you're faster than the content. For downloads (Steam, etc) the difference between 100Mbps and 1Gbps is literally a 10x speedup. If you're waiting for a multi-GB game patch to download then there is a huge mental shift between waiting 20 seconds and 4 minutes.
That said, I mainly interpreted the GP as talking about expectations. You could argue that driving at 30km/h is blazing fast compared to walking, but it's still the slowest car speed that we usually consider worth thinking about.
> "If you're waiting for a multi-GB game patch to download then there is a huge mental shift between waiting 20 seconds and 4 minutes."
It's not exactly a life altering shift though, is it? Four fewer minutes of gameplay time is not, for most people, the 'bare minimum.'
A car that only does 30km/h would be a huge downgrade for any car owner, who would no longer be able to safely drive on any highway. That's a ridiculous comparison. Most users would only perceive any difference between 100Mbps and 1Gbps in uncommon circumstances and the severity of those circumstances would almost always be minimal.
If I'm backing up multiple terabytes to rsync.net, am I going to notice the difference? Oh hell yeah. And ditto if I'm pirating HBO's entire back catalogue. But if I'm bopping around on facebook and youtube? Not a chance. Maybe a few times a month I get a big video game update and have enough time to bake some chicken tendies before it finishes downloading, but a gamer's got to eat anyway doesn't he?
> It's not exactly a life altering shift though, is it? Four fewer minutes of gameplay time is not, for most people, the 'bare minimum.'
It doesn't matter that much in absolute terms, but psychologically it can be the difference between the download finishing while you're complaining about it, or saying "meh, let's do something else instead".
How is that an 8K video? It seems like it's only available on YouTube as 1080p (60fps). It was shot originally in 8K sure, but it does not look particularly impressive on my 4K monitor.
Incidentally some videos also have VERY low bitrate encodes that also aren't shown to most users by default. This particular video goes down to 256x144, but sometimes you see even smaller, particularly with a reduced framerate.
This 8K youtube video is 5m38s long and 850MiB large: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1La4QzGeaaQ
Do the math on that and you need 21Mbps to stream that video without buffering, assuming a uniform bitrate: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=850MiB+%2F+(5+minutes+...
100Mbps down is fast for most people. What do you think the average user is doing that needs more than 100Mbps down?