APM Marketplace [1] just had a researcher on the program the other day sharing that most Americans don’t use more than 20Mbps of bandwidth, and paying for anything above that as a typical internet user is throwing your money away.

Power users, businesses, researchers, and others might expect more, but not the majority of residential users. Muni fiber investments will last quite a while.

[1] https://www.marketplace.org/2019/08/27/for-faster-internet-d...

One reason for getting a faster link is that most broadband connections in the US are not symmetric.

Comcast in my area doesn't even make claims of upload speed anymore, but my recollection of when they used to is that it was about 10% of the download speed. If you want more than 2 Mbps upload, that 20 Mbps plan wouldn't cut it.

Part of the reason for asymmetric cable modem (DOCSIS) speeds is due to the coaxial medium being essentially half duplex. Operators split the RF spectrum into a lower frequency range for upstream, and a higher frequency range for downstream. Increasing the width of the upstream range would eat into the available downstream bandwidth, and also has other implications in terms of power, noise and overall network design.

There is a full duplex version of DOCSIS, but its adoption faces some challenges due to how operators have to re-architect their physical networks to support it.

There is also currently a push to extend the downstream spectrum up to higher frequencies, enabling both more downstream bandwidth and also the ability to move the upstream split higher, therefore increasing upstream bandwidth.

(Disclaimer: I work with a client who develops products in this space.)

This. Cox basically always provides an upload bandwidth of 10x less than the download (except their gigabit plan, which is 1000/30, which is bullshit). So I pay for 300/30, because I upload things. Man I wish I could get 1000/1000 where I live...

I don't disagree that asymmetric speeds are a problem, but I think there's this bubble where tech professionals think that once everyone has gigabit up and down, your average Joe is going to be demanding 10 gigabit and up, and the data isn't proving that out. People are happy to stream a couple of views of Netflix at once and that's it (even if you're thinking everyone is going to do live syncing of block volumes to the cloud; everyone might use iCloud for their Mac backups once Apple supports it natively for Time Machine, but even then deduplication and off peak transfers will do the heavy lifting).

Agreed with that, my connection is plenty fast. It would be nice to have a faster one, but not enough that I'm going to pay more for it.

I think I'm around 50 Mbps and it could be used much more heavily, but it doesn't make any sense on YouTube's end to send me a 50 megabit video stream. It's a the storage and upload costs on the provider side limiting that.

Even if you pay extra for Netflix's 4K support, that only needs 25 megabits. It's compressed to hell compared to a 4K bluray, but if we all had faster internet I don't know if that would change. It's lot harder to market the actual visual quality of a video compared to talking about how many pixels it has.

Maybe we'll see whole new services that need the bandwidth, but most stuff that sends a lot of data could be downloaded in advance if you don't mind waiting 5 minutes instead of having it instantly accessible. How many billion dollars are we willing to spend to build out faster networks to avoid that? What's the selling point for very fast streams, we go back to cloud mainframes and all of our devices are dumb terminals that stream our games and the whole OS from an AWS datacenter?

Why is asymmetric speeds a problem? I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with having multiple types of service for different use cases. That is true with other utilities (electric, water, gas) and is part of general infrastructure planning in those areas.

Of course the actual pricing, availability, etc are also important but I don't think there needs to be a one-size-fits-all model for Internet bandwidth.

Constrains end user capabilities. Harder to live stream or heavily use something like Dropbox with under 5Mbps up.

I get that. I'm not saying that there aren't different use cases, I'm saying that it is reasonable that there should be different price points for the different use cases.

Even if the physical plant supported symmetric bandwidth, I would expect different pricing plans for different utilization patterns.

Well, for one 4k streaming will probably significantly increase desired download speeds.

I purposely limit my usage because my connection goes to shit when it's over used. My family all understands this as well. If I had better connection id be consuming way more bandwidth.

And I can't even get a faster more pricy connection because my legacy contract gives me upload speeds I don't get till I add 50% to my bill

Exactly this. I work at a research and education network (a regional ISP), and we are asked to perform upgrades and new deployments constantly. If it is just residential use, the upgrade path will be more predictable. However, business and municipal users can scale quite unpredictably and the 10GE links allocated in 2019 might need to be 100GE in 2025.