Well it was bound to happen, the multi-gigabit denier post...
That's what you use, so you think that's what the internet is built for which couldn't be further from the truth. The internet is not built just for you. When a single Steam connection can saturate even a 1gb connection you quickly realise
that the internet is built for peak usage not average usage. Why? Because it's simple math, once you handle the peaks you will be able to handle the off peaks...
Ha! I had 70/20 5 years ago to this date! I was on BT watching BT Sports 4K (~30mb), the wife on the other TV watching Netflix 4K HDR (~30mb) and as soon as my daughter started to play online games everything went downhill as there was no bandwidth left (*). So 5 years ago I had to leave VDSL2 and trade latency and reliability for bandwidth by going to VMs 350MB which was the fastest option I had at the time. It felt like a backwards step but it was the only thing I could do to cope with the usage from the house. And believe me, I spent 5 years regretting it having to deal with VM's Retentions Team to get a decent renewal price and their internet going up and down like a roller coaster. And that's 5 years ago.
FTTP take is slow because not everyone has the same needs.
Take up is slow because 1 in 7 people are lazy and don't look for better deals. The fact is FTTC is currently more expensive than FTTP so this proves my point. Some people are happy to say they can survive with 70/20 and any more than that it's an excess. Some people use PAYG and count every MB/GB so they only pay for what they use. Others get an unlimited SIM and don't need to worry about data. I would say most people don't know what's their peak usage is, so how can they actually buy a speed that suits their needs properly? (ie
good networks are built for peaks not averages)
Averages flatten peaks. And since
good networks are build for peaks you should ignore these useless stats. Mark makes a lot of valid caveats when posting about speed tests. Most uses do this via wifi which in most cases is far from being able to properly saturate a broadband router. However given the right conditions you can see proper speeds.
Have a look at the Fastest streets for broadband in the UK article for instance. You can see there that people are on 500mb and 1gb plans otherwise you wouldn't be able to see averages of 500-900mb.
Then look at the Full Fibre Altnets by Avg. Download table. Looking at the top 4 Altnets: CityFibre, Hyperoptic, Community Fibre, Netomnia (YouFibre) all offer "slower" plans 150mb or below yet when you see that table the speeds are way faster. What that is telling you is that people want faster speeds but they want it cheap. Make the difference between 150/500/1000mb a few quid and you are going to have a lot more people on the upper tiers. Just like fixed rate mortgages and unlimited broadband and SIMs most people would always prefer peace of mind, if it is available at decent price.
This couldn't be further from the truth. You can call me a niche if you want, however I would say you are stuck in the past. Like I said a single Steam download can saturate a 1gb connection and I doubt that's niche. No wonder the record peak usage events all get broken when new games/updates being released. And while I couldn't find updates stats on Steam UK users the latest I found says they have 120m active monthly users and 3% are in the UK. So that's 3.6m "niche users" right there for you. Of course you can say how many times you download games from Steam and I would say lots. Games get updated monthly now, sometimes even faster. Lots of different games means lots of different updates. Even all my Apple devices get monthly updates that go from half a gig to several gigs and that's for every Apple device in the house, which I wouldn't want to even count them. But of course even all that usage won't keep my Community Fibre 1gb symmetric connection busy all the time.
But remember, good networks are built for peaks not averages! So yes a 1gb is perfectly suitable for my usage patterns (which I haven't even started to list, just gave a sneak peak) specially when you consider that it only costs me £27/month.
And here I disagree again with you. Do I want everyone to have gigabit and multigigabit connections? Not really. I want them to have the option to get it, but I am going to force people to get things they don't know if they need or want them. Most people don't even know the difference between their wifi speed and their broadband speed, who am I to say they should get 1gb when they don't even use a wired wifi mesh system which is way more likely to improve their internet availability a lot more than a faster connection? These things are hard and if you don't invest time to research on it you will most likely end up with a wasteful setup. But I am not one that will say what people should or shouldn't buy. What I really want is everyone to have the option to get multigigabit internet and have a good competitive market so prices are low.
Both things go together. Low latency is great but low latency without enough bandwidth is useless as my 5 year predicament above proves. And remember most people are ignorant so they don't really understand the difference between latency and bandwidth. Perhaps this also explains why they aren't jumping at FTTP when offered to them.
(*) Incidentally I then found that Microsoft Flight Simulator uses around ~20mb because it streams all the land textures in real time. And while try try to do a good job in replicating the real world these are of "low" quality. Imagine what's goign to happen when they beef up the scenery to be upscaled 4K quality using machine learning and make as realistic as possible?