I have symmetric 1gbps. It's not about what generates that much data. It's about things that become feasible.

I remember when a decade ago I occasionally needed to share large VM images with a customer. I'd set up my notebook to upload it over the weekend and hope the upload wouldn't abort. Occasionally remoting in from home to check it was still uploading.

Now a 50Gb VM image is absolutely nothing to me. I can let people pull that from me during a coffee break, instead of scheduling it around a weekend.

It's not that sharing a 50Gb image was impossible before. It's that I can do it so quickly now, that I can do things like these much more liberally and don't have to plan around them as much.

My father routinely had to transfer multiple gigabytes of CAD model data to colleagues and clients back when he was was working in aerospace as a private contractor. He lived in a rural area and had to get by with satellite internet at the time. The real killer for him was the data caps and throttling that the satellite provider would impose after transmitting some ridiculously small amount like 25GB.

Not every worker in the world goes to work in a shared office space with enterprise class Comcast or fiber accounts. Modern businesses of many types can benefit or even must have fast uploads.

A self hosted website with high traffic? Maybe you’re hosting high quality video, or a high tick multiplayer game server? Perhaps those specific examples are niche use cases, but the idea is that they‘ll stop being so niche if symmetrical upload/download becomes more commonplace.

I have a gigabit home connection. No I don’t need it, but having to wait less to move data around is nice.

A week ago I downloaded a 4.5 gigabyte photo from the ESA to print and put on my wall, yes all of those pixels mattered. It took closer to 30 seconds than the ten minutes it would have otherwise on a more reasonable “fast” home internet connection. So there’s several minutes of my life I probably would have just sat around waiting for otherwise.

It’s not about big constant needs but making the delay shorter on many smaller things. (i.e. latency over throughput, but latency not in ms for computer networking but seconds and minutes for tasks on a human level)

The world isn't constrained by your imagination :)

Full-resolution VR immersion telepresence with haptic data.

I remember when even most IT people were utterly baffled by the idea that individual households could want a 1 megabit line.