Honestly it's mostly a novelty for me, I did it for bragging rights and out of curiosity.
1Gbps to 10Gbps has some tangible benefits like downloading large games in a fraction of the time, or doing super fast backups.
However when you have 25Gbps, you have a pipe twice as large as is common in standard hardware. You usually see yourself limited by 10Gbps peering links or by endpoints with only 10Gbps NICs.
And of course 25Gbps is faster than most conventional storage, you need very high-end NVMe or RAID to keep up.
If I'd have had to pay a bit extra every month, I probably wouldn't have done it. But since it was just the price of the hardware plus installation, I thought it was worth trying.
I'd pay $200/mo for that if it didn't come with a transfer cap.
That's the problem with making bandwidth the only metric that we grade broadband connections on. You end up with "Gigabit" connections that you can only use at that speed very occasionally, because otherwise you'll hit a monthly transfer cap. (E.g. Cox's "Gigablast" service, which pairs a 1Gb connection with a transfer cap worth about 20 minutes per month at gigabit speeds.)
Serious question: what do you want that much bandwidth for? I could upgrade from 100Mb/s to 1Gb/s but I haven’t because honestly can’t think of a use case for myself.
I upgraded to 1Gbps a while back, mostly because the price was the same. Also though I don’t really need it. Then I realised I can now download AAA steam games in the time it takes to make a cup of tea. No need for a separate storage drive anymore.
I rarely need that much bandwidth, but it's convenient when available. Example: when I do an OS update. The lower latency and reliability of fiber is actually more important. DOCSIS / Cable networks are very flaky, subject to interference. There will be small periods of packet loss that literally come and go with the weather (or perhaps a neighbor messing around with their wiring.)
95% of consumers won't notice, but if I'm in the middle of uploading a docker image and my upstream bandwidth drops from 30 megabits to 3 megabits due to increased packet loss and TCP re-transmissions, I definitely will. I've had this happen before. Massive packet loss in the neighborhood. It took months to get it fixed.
Can't reliably run my personal cloud with just 100 Mbit/s. The best fiber service I had access to was Frontier out in Texas, and my location capped out at 500 / 500, which was great at the time. I could easily run my personal cloud... Plex Media Server, Nextcloud, etc.
Nowadays, with my UltraHD Blu-ray rips on the Plex server, it's not unreasonable at all to require more than a 2 Gbps connection to reliably stream those. I'm often away from home, so it's nice to just be able to log into my own personal server to watch stuff at it's native and highest available quality.
Mostly for my personal cloud... Plex Media Server, Nextcloud, etc., because any service that's offering a $300 connection will also let buy a static IP for a nominal amount.
Los Altos Hills is one of the wealthiest zip codes in the country, filled with tech millionaires and billionaires.. whatever the price may be, it’s heavily subsidized by extremely rich people who became wealthy due to tech companies wanting it in the first place. On Zillow, the cheapest house there is $4M and will likely be purchased to be torn down, the most expensive property is $40M and looks like a boutique hotel. Not really fair to compare them to the normal town.
When I moved in to my house the only available option was AT&T DSL at 18/1 mbps. Comcast quoted $210k to run cable despite everyone else on my street already having a connection. It took me a year, but I organized with a bunch of my neighbors on the two streets behind my house and we trenched to get ourselves connected.
Being in a wealthy area is no guarantee of service. I currently pay $155/mo. It's symmetric 10 gbps. My router isn't grunty enough to deliver that.
