Somehow I think both are true, I'm just not sure how it's possible...
Then Google Fiber came out and ISPs started running fiber to the streets of most houses, but not running fiber directly to each house. This was in defense of Google Fiber, so they could switch people to fiber gigabit easily with little transition. Now there is DOCSIS 3.0 which does channel bonding, so a single person can have up to the equivalent of 32 TV channels of data, getting up to 1.2 gbps if unshared. Today, the average home shares their bandwidth with between 0 and 3 other houses. The fiber is right outside. If you order gigabit cable internet they will run the fiber to your front yard but not let you connect to it directly.
On comcast the lowest speed you can order where you get fiber internet is 2gbps, and because DOCSIS 3.1 now allows 10+ gbps cable internet, Comcast fiber may become a thing of the past. In a way, DOCSIS 3 has been a set back for consumers. Sure you can get multi 100mbps even gbps internet, but it allows cable companies to not have to run fiber that last 30 feet.
With fiber your ping time is lower, so your internet feels quite a bit faster. Fast internet today isn't mbps, it's ping time.
Two thoughts about this:
1. On 100/10 coax, ping times to 1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8, and 9.9.9.9 are all under 20 msec. What could a lower last mile latency possibly get me? Even cutting it to zero would seemingly not make a noticeable difference for page load times and the like.
2. I really wish this speed test measured your real latency, but it does not. It tests for latency pre-load, not during the load. Because of bufferbloat, most users will find that when they're downloading a file (whether that's someone on Netflix, or fetching a 2 MB image for a news article) their latency goes up dramatically, possibly hitting in the hundreds of msecs. It's really regrettable that this test doesn't try to measure this in any way. Fast.com does, but it's the only free test I can find that does.
After a lot of tinkering, I managed to get my latency under load down to 50 msecs without a significant drop to my maximum speeds, but this required quite a lot of tinkering with queue management on a BSD based router, and I suspect most people will see worse results.
On fiber when I'm downloading at the full 126 MB/s my ping barely goes up, unlike on cable.
They are running fiber lines although to be able to serve the the increased bandwidth demands.
In a lot of places, they're also adding lots of equipment in the last mile to shrink the "node" sizes so that the number of households within any particular shared medium on Comcast is much smaller today than it was 10 years ago. It's not the same level of build out as bringing fiber drops to every home, but it's also not nothing.
My computer in 2000 could not handle a 100 Mbps connection, and only had 32 MB of ram as I recall. The 100 Mbps may have been targeted towards businesses operating servers in a home address that were and are relatively common in the bay.
And we are stuck with Gigabit Ethernet still. I know 10Gbps is too much to ask, but how about 5Gbps?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2.5GBASE-T_and_5GBASE-T
It is still not very common. The main use case for it is backhaul for access points in commercial settings.
You can get faster stuff, but its all business level and it gets very expensive quickly. Until 8k video becomes a real thing (and thus far, 4k video isn't even much of a thing), I don't see any real need for faster network speeds. Do you?
And I often dont like the idea running into limits with Gigabits Ethernet, which is fine on itself. I just prefer to have headrooms.
For wireless that is entirely different. WiFi, even 802.11ax just aren't suited for multiple user with constant connection. People now prefer to use 4G / LTE for their speed and reliability. And that is why I would have liked to see LTE on Un-Licensed spectrum.
Yes, the switches and NICs cost more than 1 Gbps gear, but that was also true of 1 Gbps when 100 Mbps was the norm.
And if reusing existing cabling is not a constraint, used fiber+SFP switches on eBay are well within the reach of a hobbyist.