4K movie seeking on consumer devices can be dramatically faster when you increase from 50mbit/s to 400mbit/s, even though you'll still download just as much movie as you would on either speed. We're talking the difference between 5-10 seconds of buffering and beginning playback immediately. Video game updates also accelerate dramatically, allowing more efficient use of free time.
Incidentally, here's anecdotal data from a family of two adults and two children from today's Comcast thread (where I assume you're participating, given the comment), that shows that they have stayed below the 1.2TB Comcast threshold for over a year, even through the pandemic, while not making any effort to stay under that threshold since they aren't on Comcast: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25200882
Just because there are data caps on some providers is no reason to tolerate unnecessarily slow internet connections. The speed of the connection is an effective and measurable stand-in for the modernity and capacity of the infrastructure delivering internet to that area.
Sadly, latency isn't a popular measure for Internet connectivity, and as my year of testing uncovered, 50mbit down and 5mbit up is more than sufficient for downloading + 4k streaming + zoom all at the same time, as long as your router has smart shaping/queueing capabilities and your connection has stable latency in that scenario.
Incidentally, here's anecdotal data from a family of two adults and two children from today's Comcast thread (where I assume you're participating, given the comment), that shows that they have stayed below the 1.2TB Comcast threshold for over a year, even through the pandemic, while not making any effort to stay under that threshold since they aren't on Comcast: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25200882
Just because there are data caps on some providers is no reason to tolerate unnecessarily slow internet connections. The speed of the connection is an effective and measurable stand-in for the modernity and capacity of the infrastructure delivering internet to that area.
Sadly, latency isn't a popular measure for Internet connectivity, and as my year of testing uncovered, 50mbit down and 5mbit up is more than sufficient for downloading + 4k streaming + zoom all at the same time, as long as your router has smart shaping/queueing capabilities and your connection has stable latency in that scenario.