How often is the performance difference between 100 megabit and gigabit internet all that measurable, though? For that matter, how often do truly get even, say, 900 megabits allocated to you on that sort of connection?

I'm not doubting they actually give you a gigabit connection, but especially during peak hours, I doubt the transit links you hit would necessarily have that much to spare.

> How often is the performance difference between 100 megabit and gigabit internet all that measurable, though?

For doing backups/restores, in this age of multi-terabyte disks, fast network links (especially in the upload direction) are a necessity.

I don't mind some oversubscription, I can work around peak hours, hell, I'd love to temporarily trade away most of my downlink bandwidth in exchange for uplink bandwidth -- average upload speed is all that matters for this sort of large transfer.

It's the tail end of the PM peak here, and I'm getting 420 mbps to my web host, about 450 to Azure (on a 500/500). I think it's growing pains from Verizon's gigabit rollout, because when I was at 300/300, I consistently got over the rated speed.

In the US, if you don't have symmetric streams, the average high-speed stream is 6mbps/100mbps up/down. The next milestone is still going to discriminate against content producers, IT workers, and software engineers.

Compounding that, the latency comcast deliberately introduces into their network (I've got many ISP's to judge on here) makes the internet ugly, but only if you don't pay for their services.

What we need is not a target for faster downstream, but higher competition - I could give a shit about network neutrality if the providers offered network honesty: a 500 GB monthly limit is a 1.5mB stream - full stop.