Even if they mean MBit, I rarely need more than 8. What are some of the things people do that they need something that fast?
Remote programmer work. I push and pull around many GBs every day. 8Mb/second would be -at best- difficult to bear. I also often do teleconferencing (and screen sharing) while pushing around lots of data.
If there were multiple people on my LAN who were doing remote programmer work, or who were just -say- watching "streaming" video while I was working, or -say- chose to patch a video game while I was working, 8Mb/second would make working impossible.
Hell, even 40Mb/second is pretty terrible. I recently moved from a 1400/40 Mb link to a ~300/300 Mb link. Despite the dramatic reduction in download speed, it's way, way, way better.
Also you can’t watch 1080p without stutters while waiting. You can’t watch 1440p60 or 4k in any case.
Why do we need 25 MBit on all the farms and rural lands? (quoted from another subthread)
Because otherwise these areas will get stuck with <25mbps forever, and there’s already no reserve in 8-10mbps.
8Mbps (please capitalize the "M" for "mega" and lowercase the "b" for bits) is 8,000,000 bits per second.
That translates to about 0.954 MiB/sec (Mebibytes per second, see the "i" and the capital "B"?) which is close enough to 1.
Download speeds can, and should, be measured in computer-oriented mebibytes per second, rather than bits per second, because you are, after all, transferring files. (And yeah, disk space is often measured in powers of ten...) Your ISP's data cap is undoubtedly measured in gibibytes or tebibytes (even though they call them gigabytes or terabytes, that's what the units mean.)
So when you run speedtest.net or Ookla or whatever, you're measuring the actual throughput that the computer's network interface can squeeze through the narrowest straw in your link to the server. That is necessarily a touch lower than the lowest signaling rate of whatever equipment is in-between. Internet connections are sold by trumpeting signaling rates, but those are NOT download nor upload speeds. Never confuse them, because they are overly-optimistic estimates of your maximum throughput (which is infeasible given most PHY and link-layer frame designs.)
Hitting network speed limits doesn't just cap you in those scenarios, it degrades very badly very quickly.
8Mbps is more than enough for a few dozen people to play any modern game on the same connection.
I'm rural, I work remote, and I've done so for quite a while on about a 15/3 connection. I've got somewhat better now, and I have Starlink for the house right now (though at the ever-increasing costs, I'm debating dropping it and going back to a rural WISP for bulk transfer).
If you're on a lower speed connection... you don't try to live life like you're on gigabit. You cache content locally (Jellyfin or Plex solves a lot, DVD season pack bundles are dirt cheap on eBay and a USB DVD reader can read anything), you do lower bandwidth stuff, and you work around the availability. I've taken many video calls with audio over a cell phone, because my ISP was having a crappy day.
You can invent scenarios in which you "need" gigabit, but they sound like the artificially constructed situations they are, because not everyone has 16 people working from home with another 12 insisting on their own individual 4k streams.
that seems silly, and I don't think that's ever been a widespread driving philosophy. Much more common (and sadly, also lost these days) is building a better world for our kids and their kids, etc. Trying to improve life for us and those around us, with hope that the next generation has it better than we did.
If you have to work around slow internet by buying DVD's instead of streaming, pre-downloading movies you want to watch, or calling in to video calls to get reliable audio, I think it's fair to say that you "need" faster internet. Maybe not gigabit, but definitely faster than whatever you have now.
I mean, I guess if your chief usage of traffic is to the outside world, a really snappy LAN doesn't mean much at all; it's not your bottleneck. But I'm confused about your post which appears to contradict itself. Perhaps I misunderstood, and your kitchen remodel only involved AC electrical and no networking. No IoT fridge yet?
If I were pulling network cabling today for a remodel, it'd surely be multi-mode fiber in the 100Gbit range, right? Right?
4K streaming video can easily be 25Mbps. A family of 3-4 people can easily have multiple TVs and each one can be using bandwidth even when nobody is attending to it. Presumably this family has none because none of them will work. The average family has 25 internet using devices including computers, laptops, consoles, smart devices etc. Meanwhile average websites have ballooned up to 2MB or 16Mb per page. If you get 70% of max bandwidth and divide it even 10 ways you'll easily be waiting around 10 seconds per page. It's common now to have a camera out front triggered by motion but this requires more upstream than your 8Mbps connection from 1999 is liable to have since most connections aren't symmetrical. Same with video conferencing which will largely be impossible.
What's that you say johnny wants to play the latest triple A game? Well its 80GB of data. With over subscription and other devices you'll be very lucky to average more than 2Mbps over the 4 days this will require during which the family connection will suck even more than it normally does.
Now that stuff like Starlink exists, it's easier to give the finger to Hughesnet and exploitative WISPs. Even still, the years I spent growing up with bare-minimum internet at cable-package prices has made me spiteful. It should have been addressed long before the private sector got around to fixing it.
Also people forget: farmers have families and kids, etc, and while the farmer themselves may not need much internet, the kids can't even do basic school anymore without it. But that said, farmers still have and watch TVs, facetime with their families, stream music, etc.
All that said though, Starlink is up to like $120/month and still not reliable enough to fully ditch the backup exploitative WISP if you work from home as I do, so Starlink is walking dangerously close to the line of exploitative. But they're here and working, so I will happily pay the money. I just hope that over time the $/b will get a lot more competitive.
And for that reason, as a farmer, I can get gigabit service on my farms, but where I live in an urban area where the infrastructure isn't as old and is still moderately capable I am topped out at 50 Mbit service.