It's nice to be able to do networked stuff with the network.

32GB isn't very big these days. In terms of cost, a decent cheeseburger costs more than a 32GB flash card does.

A few months ago I needed a friend to send me a 32GB file. This took over 8 hours to accomplish with his 10Mbps upstream. 8 hours! I felt like it was 1996 again and I was downloading Slackware disksets with a dialup modem.

We needed to set up a resumable way to get his computer to send that file to my computer, and be semi-formal about it because 8 hours presents a lot of time for stuff to break.

But if we had gigabit speeds, instead? We could have moved that file in less than 5 minutes. That'd have been no big deal, with no need to be formal at all: If a 5-minute file transfer dies for some reason, then it's simple enough to just start it over again.

This is like asking why would anyone need more than a standard 110v North American electrical outlet in their home? Why would you ever install a higher capacity 220v socket somewhere?

Because it's a utility and there's a wide world of use cases out there.

For electrical maybe someone wants to charge an electric car fully overnight, or use a welder in their garage. Or use some big appliance in their kitchen.

For Internet maybe they make videos, games or other types of data-heavy content and need to be able to upload and download it.

It is 2.5Gbps internet shared with everyone in the household. Once you start dividing by 4 or 5 people that number doesn't seems that impressive.

It wasn't that long ago "internet" at home is literally just one person using it.

A few things come to mind:

- Games (400GB for Ark, 235GB for Call of Duty, 190GB for God of War)

- LLMs (e.g. DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp at 690GB or Kimi-K2 at 1030GB unquantized)

- Blockchains (Bitcoin blockchain approaching 700GB)

- Deep learning datasets (1.1PB for Anna's Archive, 240TB for LAION-5B at low resolution)

- Backups

- Online video processing/storage

- Piracy (Torrenting)

Of course you can download those things on a slower connection, but I imagine that it would be a lot nicer if it went faster.

My anecdata is that I can download a steam or Xbox game (100+GB) in a few minutes. Plus it's just fun. High number = better and all that.

To not bottleneck the mechanical hard drives in their NAS, or to download games at a reasonable speed.

Or even just work stuff, I've had to shift around several TB of 3D assets for my job while working from home.

Homelab or they are into big data set usage.

Or they seed large datasets for other researchers.

All the replies you get here are totally valid, but Ill throw in another one.

Why not? Life’s too short anyways, and playing around with tech is one of those things that bring me joy.

Shuffle around RAW files if you are doing photography. These are 50-150MB files. A lot of them.

To transfer files? Like large virtual machines, huge video files. Backup their files quickly. To support a homelab to learn new skills. To stream uncompressed video. To download 300 GB monster games.

Some people can manage with slow network speeds at home, even though 100 Gbps single mode fiber is perfectly doable nowadays. And it's reasonable, because new SSDs do almost 120 Gbps.

1 Gbps made sense 20 years ago when single hard disks had similar performance. For some weird reason LAN speeds did not improve at the same rate as the disks did.

But then again, I guess many could also still manage with 100 Mbps connectivity at home. Still enough for 4k video, web browsing and most other "ordinary" use cases.

I can't comment on the internet, but high-bandwidth wifi helps with VR streaming quality.