For reference I have 400/20 Cable, for 44Eur/m. No caps. Provider Pyur. Overall medium terrible experience.
One has no option but ADSL which reaches 8Mbps on a good day, the other is luckier and has Cable but only 100Mbps.
What use would you have for throughput in excess of 100Mbps?
I very rarely have use for capacity beyond 40Mbps, or perhaps even 25. 4K streaming is as demanding as it gets. If 40Mbps is appreciably cheaper than 100, I'll take 40.
If your Internet connection can't handle video chat and streaming, then you're right to say you don't have a decent modern Internet connection, and it's holding back what you can do. Capacity beyond 40Mbps, though, is rarely of any real consequence.
(I mean this in the particular context of home broadband, of course.)
But the thing is that thanks to fiber there's hardly any difference price wise. So why not use it, when it's on offer?
Before that I had 100Mb up and down and was pretty happy with it. Large games could be a bit of a drag. Especially when GTA5 became available and I wanted to play it right now!
Once the JSON parses, that is ;-P
If you want to run several 4K streams at once, you'll need more than 40Mbps. I don't think many households have this requirement though.
If you're regularly dealing with huge video files, then sure, you may be in the small minority that really does benefit from an extremely fast connection.
And yes I regularly have PDFs and PPTs of that size (thank you web agencies that keep on sending 20 pages product kit with 8K background pictures).
I do agree it's overkill and we all could do without if we prepared better but that's how it is.
And like 1/10 houses are actually networked well enough to even use a 300 mbit connect.
The only practical difference I’ve seen is upload. Cable internet is usually slow enough to impact actual use.
I've had 1Gbps before, and it was fantastic.
Checking out repositories is a rare event. It's even rarer to check out repositories weighing tens of gigabytes, such that throughput in excess of 100Mbps is noticeable.
As I said in my reply to CaptainZapp, it's generally fine if a background process like a backup takes several hours, and that's just for the few people who need to backup tens of gigabytes of data to the Internet every day. For everyone else, 100Mbps is far more than enough.
For most home users in particular, capacity beyond 40Mbps rarely brings any benefit.
That's not too bad, is it? Sweden has had world-leading broadband for a decade, and your upload could be higher, but "downright embarrassing" is people stuck on a 24Mbit ADSL connection.
(I have 300/30 Mbit/s cable for 340DKK = 45€. I could upgrade to 1000/500 Mbit/s fibre for ... actually only 320DKK, but I haven't bothered.)
Of course they 'could', but that would mean for corruption to have gone down and political competence to have gone up in those 40 years but unfortunately it hasn't, quite the opposite.
In Germany, high level corruption and political incompetence has only increased in that time (see BER airport, VW emissions scandal, and the handling of COVID).
Basically if you're well connected and rich, you're untouchable in Germany and your corruption mishaps will be swept under the rug as casual political 'whoopsies' right after you retire to a gold plated pension.
So it's not that you're completely untouchable. Even with friends in high places.
It was written in some comments before, but Germany could have had the most modern fiber infrastructure in the world when the plans of former chancellor Helmut Schmitt wouldn't have been stopped by the Helmut Kohl government who was good friends with Leo Kirch, who was a big player in the German TV market and would rather benefit from copper wiring than fiber.