In Australia, where this petition is relevant, these acronyms are well understood by the public and don't need further explanation.
Oh, 25 Mbps is fast enough? So if I were to offer you $25 or $1000 which would you take?
Ugh. The NBN is a good idea, but poorly sold to the older generation who cannot seem to grasp the idea of its importance,
Of course it's fast enough! You can fill your entire 640 kB of RAM (who needs that much anyway?) in 200ms with that raw speed.
So if I were to offer you $25 or $1000 which
would you take?
For much of the life of the internet, we had the experience where everything was slow and awkward. Modems sucked. But now, people have things they want to do online and they find it's fine - they can access their email, and websites, and youtube, and play games.
There was a similar transition with computers. All computers used to be slow, and they used to suck. Then during the Windows XP era, the slowness and suckiness of a computer started to decline, and people didn't think about it any more. They stopped buying new desktops and wanting OS upgrades.
You can point out things that would be possible with faster computers or bandwidth - fine. Regardless, for the things that people are doing now, people tend to be content about things where ten years ago they were unhappy, often very unhappy.
The opposition case to the NBN claim that the government was forcing taxpayers into a vast, unbudgeted public works scheme, and that it wouldn't even be delivering something that was strongly needed by the people. The opinion of the man in the street about their current internet is a reasonable metric in estimating the value of the NBN.
Maybe the reason that Australians only have the speed that they currently have is because there isn't a pressing need for more speed. Imagine that. Billions of dollars saved with no effort.
What do you need to do at 1Gbps that you can't do at 25Mbps?
Which is, you know - a lot. In the age of user created content, telecommuting and cloud services being unable to upload faster then 128 kilobytes per second is a killer.
If you're dealing with any type of multimedia content you can be needing to move 10-20 megabytes per cycle between a few people with ease - that time adds up, and it constrains how you work.
Mobile devices have been used as misdirection throughout the NBN debate, because very few people are uploading large YouTube videos from their smartphones over 3G and for anything that's got some level of production to it they'll be working on it on laptops and desktops at home and the like.
Maybe in the future we'll all need 1 gbit backbones, but not today.
If we were talking about enabling everyone to buy say, 10/10 or 20/20 symmetric service then I would not particularly care - in fact a lot of people advocating for FTTH would be placated. But it is not possible to do that with current infrastructure because current infrastructure sucks. Symmetric DSL tops out at 2/2 for about $600 a month.
For reference, I'm in the UK and have a 6Mbps connection, which I could upgrade if I thought it was worth paying more.
This is an important lesson for ANY sort of activism or public outreach (or marketing): people know a LOT less about your area of concern than you think they do.