Pulling or pushing Docker images, downloading LLM models, installing AAA games from Steam. There are so many use cases that you won't see if you're just doing email and web browsing with a little bit of video streaming.

It's also helpful for off-site backup. I believe off-site backup is very important, and having gigabit upload is very helpful for this.

> I don't understand the desire (fetish?)

If you don't need it then you should be happy with what you've got, but calling other people's uses a "fetish" is unnecessary. And weird.

The total bandwidth up/down is only part of the story.

I was on a cell modem until very recently. Just the latency difference between gigabit fiber and anything else is noticeable for me. When a website loads a ton of stuff in a single page, some of that is serialized and requests are back to back instead of parallelized. The longer the serial chain, the higher you multiply your round trip time. This is especially so with auth providers that take you away and back to a site (or similar for online purchases via external sites (eg: PayPal etc.)) All of that time adds up.

So, my home connection is now down to 11.9 ms to google.com, my wifi adds another 5ms. I did "start timeline recording" and hit the google homepage. It just took 900ms to load the front page in Safari. On a good day with my cell hotspot, my latency is 35 at idle and goes way up (sometimes in seconds) when pushing bandwidth.

Video calls with 1000ms and higher latency are ... difficult. Especially when everyone else is in the sub 100ms range.

I've been consulting a long time, and my home is my office.

Besides the uses other people have suggested, here are some uses I would have for a fast symmetrical connection:

- Backing up data to my home/office NAS while away.

- Remoting to my workstation desktop from any location, for any reason.

- Using my home as a Tailscale exit node for clients for whom it's already a hassle to allowlist my home office's IP, so I can work from anywhere.

- Switching my nixos configuration using the caches in my home office where my custom derivations are built.

I have 90Mbps down and 20Mbps up. All of the above is workable but it would be great, amazing if it were faster.

The remote places I would do this from:

- the doctors' waiting room because we have teenagers

- the bleachers of the pool for the diving lessons because we have teenagers

- the in-laws spare bedroom where we're visiting for an extended time during school holidays but not work holidays because we have teenagers.

Some of us have different needs, under choices that we make that are optimal for other aspects of our life but not for having a slower asymmetric connection at home.

I use my home connection for VPN access remotely. I back up snapshots of data every day. I like to be able to download games and Linux ISOs practically on demand. I work from home and often enough faster speeds can avoid several minutes of additional waiting in a day.

This connection is shared as well. My partner relies heavily on cloud syncing. We both like to stream 4K HDR video. I like being able to get devices updated and ready to use with minimal time spent waiting for downloads.

I also live in NZ, where multi-gigabit fibre connections are often cheaper than what Americans have to pay for a fraction of the bandwidth. It’s not a notable financial burden or anything, and it’s not like we have data caps to worry about. It’s very much a situation where the use cases naturally find themselves once the option is there.

Also, 25/10 Mbps is painfully slow for a shared home connection in the modern day. There’s videos on YouTube that can push a higher bitrate than that. The absolute slowest plan that my ISP even offers is 100/20 Mbps for about $35 USD per month, while the most common/baseline plan for most households in NZ is 500/100 Mbps after the fibre carriers continued to increase speeds at the lowest tiers.

I have gigabit synchronous fiber at home thanks to a group of local tech folk who built out the network. The biggest change for me is that I rely more on my NAS at home over a Wireguard tunnel for things I would have used the cloud or a hosting service for before.

Going to work? No worries about forgetting a USB stick or portable SSD. I can always just fire up Wireguard and grab it from home.

Sharing Jellyfin access with family and friends has also been fun.

>I have 25 Mbps up. 10 Mbps down. Have had it for years. It's fine.

Do you mean the other way around, 25Mbps Down and 10 Mbps up?

It is nice to have, especially when it doesn't cost much. That is why I am perfectly OK with PON rather than dedicated fibre. You only need the 1 or 10Gbps speed for may be a 10 min window per month.

I do think 25Mbps on a house hold bases is quite low. On a 5Mbps Video file I want the first 10 second buffer, 50Mbps done instantly. While I am loading multiple page in the background. Multiply that with a few more user in family. It is perfectly useable a you said, if you dont mind waiting.

Otherwise I think 50 - 100Mbps per person is generally the point we see law of diminishing returns.

Working from home on raw and cooked SKA data and visualisations being remote served by supercomputing centres, team co-editing of multiple raw RED cinema camera channels.

Essentially any job that involves massive fat data streams that ends up having a real time collabrative hybrid remote team.

I don't want to wait 6hrs to download a game patch that's 40gb or whatever because that's sadly the norm. With 1gbit I can do anything and it doesn't induce latency or cause connection quality issues with anything else because no one thing can come close to saturating it really, with a few exceptions (Steam being the main one). I can also seed at high speed to private trackers. It'd be an effort to max out a 25gbit connection at home that's for sure.

Past 200Mbps down I typically see very little real benefit.

That said, I do find myself downloading packages and watching 4K video all day long. 25Mbps is noticeably slower the majority of the time. You can get by, of course, the same way you can compile an Xcode project on a 2019 Intel Mac (I still think MacOS 26 supports Intel?) but it's a significantly nicer experience on more recent M series machines.

Who likes to sit around waiting on downloads/compilation?

Now I'm realizing you said 25Mbps up, 10Mbps down. Wow, assuming this isn't a mistake, 10Mbps is slow enough to make even normal web browsing start to chug IME.

- Downloading local LLM models

- Downloading games, movies etc.

- Updating software.

- Doing remote data backups or restoring from them.

- Browsing the internet. Fiber still makes a noticeable difference especially in badly optimized websites.

An example from someone who has lived at a condo in Asia. Around 8 PM the internet becomes unusable. Everyone's back home and they want to watch their favorite series. If you need to work at that time, e.g. if you work US hours, you are screwed.

P.S. I experienced this at different condos in different countries in South East Asia.

Uploading 15 minute videos to YouTube, downloading hundreds of gigabytes of 3D assets, updating large applications, streaming movies for a 4k projector, frequently downloading beta OS updates, etc, etc, etc.

The optionality of consuming services from places other than internet titans for one would be nice.

640k ought to be enough for anybody?