At this point I consider it a minor fringe benefit of being a network engineer that I realize there's hardly any point to going above 500Mb. There's a big price cliff there with my local provider, but... what would I do with that? Download a Steam game every other month slightly faster? Not worth over 70 bucks a month.

Yep completely agree.

I lived with about 5 people and our internet was 500mbps and it was more than enough.

Looking at the network monitor the only need for anything really above 100mbps was when people wanted to download something. For daily needs, surfing, browsing, the odd download you don't need a lot. And that's with everyone streaming, scrolling, gaming etc concurrently.

The cheapest internet where I live (just outside London) is gigabit, which is why I have it, but really I haven't needed anything faster than ADSL at any point, unless I guess I really want that game downloaded now now now.

That's not really the point of the topic though right, it's that in the UK I have the choice of a billion different ISPs, including (I think stupidly) three different fibre providers (I literally have two fibre connections to my house because I changed ISPs and they ran on different fibre networks), and in the US all I hear about is streamers complaining that they are all stuck with the same shitty ISP as there is no choice, in a country that supposedly champions choice.

There are a few things that support it, at least in my experience… I get close to line rate for steam downloads for large games, and other content with a good CDN.

The main benefit, though, is if you have many simultaneous connections running, all using a lot of bandwidth.