Well, consumers in Austria and Germany have by far the shittiest internet in all of EU.

That's what you get when you let your politicians sell you out to monopolists.

Thank you Mr. Dr. Helmut Kohl!

Just a few years ago our office (two floors, Fortune 500 company, more than 100 people on site) had a 100Mbps connection to the Internet (and a dedicated 1Gbps to a branch office). We had video conferences, mirrored OSS and back'ed up over the 'net. The dedicated link was at times a bottleneck, but I don't recall that the link to the Internet ever was.

With the shift to cloud computing, at least in the awkward hybrid phase, that won't suffice for a business of that size, but it really isn't obvious what a single person would _need_ a gigabit connection for. Perhaps you can elaborate.

Honestly, I don't saturate my connection 99% of the time. I could have done that 10/15 years ago when I used to torrent a lot.

The download part is great because now it's faster to buy a game on steam for instance and download it than getting in the car, driving to the closest store to purchase a physical copy and bring it home.

Regarding the upload, I built a small utility that stores the videos from the cameras I have at home to the cloud in a rolling window (I didn't want to pay the service from the cameras provider). So at any time I am uploading something like 7 1080p streams (it's more bursty as I chunk the streams every 10 minutes and upload the resulting files). So, while 1Gb is still an overkill, once you have the bandwidth you find uses for it.