Six years ago, I nearly got my ISP to upgrade our fibre connection to 1Gbps. As I said at the time: This is a curmudgeonly post which is going to look ridiculously outdated in a few years. What's the point of Gigabit broadband? Well, it's a few years later and Virgin Media have just given me their Gig1 package for £30 per month. Nice! With all the inflation related price rises, it's great to …
While I agree that there is no real use for gigabit for the average person, I disagree that rolling out gigabit everywhere is pointless.
For anyone who wants to use the internet for more than the consumption of content, the old upload speeds were a significant barrier. Gigabit, and especially gigabit upload speeds largely removed those barriers.
Symmetric gigabit in every home has taken away a bottleneck for people who want to, for example, run a bandwidth intensive internet business from their home. It provides people with opportunities they might otherwise not get.
Symmetric gigabit is this a thing, tho? Usually consumer level broadband can be huge download, but meekly upload no matter the tech used because they’d like to sell you more expensive options. That said I’d benefit greatly with it. And agree with you (and partially OP) that it’s not for everybody. But those of us who need it, it’d be awesome.
I have 2 gig symmetric fiber and it costs $70 a month.
Speed tests confirmed that I’m actually getting 2 up 1.8 down consistently.
I have my whole house wired with cat 5e and it’s pretty nice.