I'm all for progress but... Why?

What possible use could an end user have for a 4gbit connect? The router alone is going to set you back a few hundred bucks.

640K ought to be enough for anybody.

Future proofing and it gives people the possibility to think big. If most of the country is stuck at 20 Mb, then most people will think in and build 20Mb applications.

Who knows what people will cook up if they are unbridled. Of course limiting users also breeds innovation to overcome the limitations (youtube-dl is a good example), but artificially creating limitations for the sake of money, isn't a good argument IMO.

If you want applications for the future, don't limit it.

You mean well, but to be entirely honest, I'm happy if the 20Mb sentiment persists. Because no matter what you do, there will always be some people who cannot get gigabit (physical limitations, work abroad, etc.), but nobody cares about them.

Plenty of things come to mind that can involve a lot of data

- Docker and other VM images - Backups - 4K video editing synced to shared NASes when working from home - Build and content syncing for gamedev when working from home

4gbit/s is still slow enough for me to spend minutes syncing a mere 100GB, even if I can exclusively saturate that link and not share it with a roommate. That's smaller than some blueray disks and many steam games in their compressed/compiled/processed states for a single platform - no debug symbols, no built object caches, no source assets. It's not uncommon for me to resync a significant portion of that due to mass rebuilds, poorly handled content refactoring, or just switching projects when my local disks (mechanical, SSD, and otherwise) are all full.

> What possible use could an end user have for a 4gbit connect?

Who knows. I was excited to do icecc over a gigabit WAN on those "cloud" servers.

If someone hacks into your computer, they want to exfiltrate the data fast, right?

4k, 8k and future proofing? How many 4K 5.1 high quality streams can 1g handle?

Roughly 9~ concurrent streams (if we're talking uncompressed blurays) assuming the network infrastructure is dedicated. OTOH If talking Netflix 4k, the number of streams capable here is just about infinite :)

> How many 4K 5.1 high quality streams can 1g handle?

1 Gbps can handle about 8¹ to 40² 4K streams.

¹ 2160p60 on Blu-Ray goes up to 100 Mbps

² Typical 4K Netflix streams are in the 15-20 Mbps region, with a recommended Internet bandwidth of 25 Mbps.