Probably. Imagine having children. Streaming (up and down), videochatting, gaming, torrenting, downloading patches and so on. They will not hit 1Gbit/s all the time but when everyone is on the net at once it will be nice to have some "room".
I do have kids - 3 of them. They aren't torrenting age yet, but we certainly do more than our fair share of video streaming. Gaming is not bandwidth intensive. Downloading patches is, but that's not really sustained throughput.
A bigger pipe will certainly get used occasionally, but I can't help but think that the vast majority of that pipe will sit completely unused for a large percentage of the time you're paying for it. Torrenting is just about the only circumstance I can think of where you might actually get to fully utilize that pipe, specifically because you aren't bound to a single upstream, but you'd almost have to go looking for files large enough for that throughput to matter. An uncompressed blu-ray is what, 25GB, and that's still less than an hour to download on a 60mbit connection. Given that compression is a thing, it just seems like your chances to actually utilize it will be minimal at best.
That, and, downloading GTA 5's 59 gigabyte installer in 12 minutes was nice... Or, when I was about to leave on a road trip & downloaded my entire itunes library in just a few moments. Lots of cases where insane speed is beautiful.
//moved to Chattanooga for gigabit($70 a month). Love it. :)
Those are definitely great cases, but they only apply when the upstream can actually give you data that fast. My question is more - are there enough upstreams providing pipes big enough that gigabit users can actually use what they're paying for on a regular basis?
