Our cable internet is sold as "up to 100mbps", so the joke at our house is that if we ever get 101mbps we will sue them for breach of contract.
Edit: I realize it isn't a good joke.
Edit: I realize it isn't a good joke.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/87071149/spark-wa...
I probably use around 5TB of data per month as well.
In Poland I ave 300/30 Mbit (they connected fiber to my house recently) for 50 PLN (it is about 19 NZD, or 13 USD) per month. They offer 600/60 in some cities (where there is more competition), but I don't know the price, I think is is more in 80PLN range. And plan to start also 1 gbit plan (probably with 100 Mbit uplink).
I use the G Suite Google Drive and get nearly full gbit while up and downloading.
Nope, 100% unlimited. Metered connections were a thing here 5 years ago, nowdays you generally get 80GB or so to start with and can upgrade to unlimited for a little extra. I pay $129 NZD ($91 USD~) per month for my unlimited almost-gigabit connection which is the most expensive residential tier available, and I can pick from any number of ISPs (there's like 5 major ones and plenty of tiny players) as the infrastructure is shared, unlike what you see in the U.S. with the cable companies.
The move to fiber (it ends on my box) was awesome.
Measured at the demarc Ethernet segment, L2 throughput including framing overhead, with a single TCP stream to a server I control that is about 1000 miles away.
The effect is, for say 40MBps VDSL (the service most UK households with "broadband" use, almost always ultimately delivered through a copper telephone cable from BT's Openreach last mile subsidiary) all the ISPs will advertise that as "up to 38Mbps" because at least 10% of their customers can get 38Mbps out of that link. Nobody gets 50Mbps, the link layer is throttled because they're on a 40Mbps product, but plenty of people absolutely will get 40Mbps even though the advert said "up to 38Mbps".
That includes my very tech-savvy ISP which is obliged to say "up to 38Mbps" in big print everywhere even though it explains that you're buying the 40Mbps VDSL service and talks about deep network internals, and even though its customers usually know exactly what speed they'll get (I get 40Mbps) because they're technical people and know how to measure.
Now, suppose you're one of the people getting 30Mbps from the 40Mbps VDSL product. Should you upgrade? There's an "up to 76Mbps" product advertised by your supplier, surely that would be faster? No. All the "up to 76Mbps" product does is change the throttle to 80Mbps, and you aren't impacted by the throttle so the product will simply cost more and achieve nothing.
Now, in fact under those rules an ISP had an incentive NOT to sell you the expensive product, because if they give you the 80Mbps product then you hurt their "up to 76Mbps" averages and make it harder to sell the product.
The result of _that_ change to the market was ISPs would have a headline product advertised heavily e.g. "Guaranteed at least 60Mbps for £24.99 per month" and then if they couldn't meet the guarantee for a particular customer they wouldn't magically fix things to go faster, they would simply say "Ah, you don't qualify for that offer, you can have a refund and the service stops, or pay £9.99 per month for our other product "Guaranteed 10Mbps" which we're meeting.
The ideology behind all this stuff is that our old friend the "invisible hand" will fix it. But er, no. There is actually only one last mile technology involved (for people in most cities there is a competitor, Cable TV cables, but that's a whole separate ball of wax) and it's VDSL offered at speeds set by the wholesaler. It will perform exactly the same whether you buy your "service" from an ISP with a call centre staff in India that uses a purple logo and has a chimp mascot, or you buy "service" from two blokes named James who work out of a rented office in Liverpool, because the "ISP" part is trivial and largely irrelevant except for branding, and the last mile part is a natural monopoly provided always by the exact same engineers, same copper cables, same everything.
If you consume a lot of video online, the caps can be hit surprisingly quickly.