Higher bandwidths are good to have. They're great for rare, exceptional circumstances.
10G internet doesn't make your streaming better, but downloads the latest game much faster. It makes for much less painful transfer of a VM image from a remote datacenter to a local machine.
Which is good and bad. The good part is that it makes it easier for the ISPs to provide -- most people won't be filling that 10G pipe, so you can offer 10G without it raising bandwidth usage much at all. You're just making remote workers really happy when they have to download a terabyte of data on a single, very rare occasion instead of it taking all day.
The bad part is that this comfort is harder to justify. Providing 10G to make life more comfortable the 1% of the time it comes into play still costs money.
I have 1Gbps down, and the only application I've found to saturate it is downloads from USENET (and with that I need quite a few connections downloading different chunks simultaneously to achieve it).
I have never come remotely close to downloading anything else -- including games -- at 1Gbps.
The source side certainly has the available pipe, but most (all?) providers see little upside to allowing one client/connection to use that much bandwidth.
Only the newest routers do gigabit over wifi. If most of your devices are wireless, you'll need to make sure they all have wifi 6 or newer chips to use their full potential.
Even if upgrading your router is a one-time cost, it's still enough effort that most people won't bother.
This tracks. I recently upgraded from 100mbps to 500mbps (cable), and barely anything is different— even torrents bumped from 5MB/s to barely 10MB/s. And there's no wifi involved there, just a regular desktop on gigabit ethernet.
Same here. My ISP recently did a promo to try out 1G/1G for free for a few months. I decided not to buy it after the free trial and went back to my old 500/200 line instead of paying 40% more. Yeah, it takes a minute longer downloading the latest LLM from huggingface, so what.
I'm getting my Steam games at 2Gbps, and I am suspecting that my aging ISP's "box" is to blame for the cap (didn't want to pay my ISP for the new box that officially supports 8Gbps symmetrical, and just got a SFP+ adapter for the old one). I pay 39€/M for what is supposed to go "up to" 8Gbps/500Mbps on that old box.
Games from Google Drive mirrors are coming at full speed too.
Nice when dling that new Skyrim VR 90GB mod pack refresh
Steam used to max out my internet, but now its smarter about it and starts to decrypt/expand the download as its going instead of doing it in phases. This quickly maxes out my IOPS on even NVMe drives at only several hundred megabits for most games I've tried recently.
10G internet doesn't make your streaming better, but downloads the latest game much faster. It makes for much less painful transfer of a VM image from a remote datacenter to a local machine.
Which is good and bad. The good part is that it makes it easier for the ISPs to provide -- most people won't be filling that 10G pipe, so you can offer 10G without it raising bandwidth usage much at all. You're just making remote workers really happy when they have to download a terabyte of data on a single, very rare occasion instead of it taking all day.
The bad part is that this comfort is harder to justify. Providing 10G to make life more comfortable the 1% of the time it comes into play still costs money.