As a power user who now has 4Gb/s FDX at home I can definitively say as an end user you really can’t tell much of different from my previous 1G/0.5Gbs GPON in normal use. However there are a couple of areas that I have noticed a difference –

Upstream. On GPON I had 500Mb/s upstream and this is intelligently oversubscribed by the OLT. Large uploads like cloud storage would consume the entire upstream for the duration. While things still worked fine for the duration of the uploads this does have a small affect on other normal operations during this time. With the XGSPON upstream is so large that nothing can fill it no matter what you do.
1G downstream was certainly enough for everything in the house, but with the 4Gbs the bottlenecks are now the hard drives or local LAN connections. It is quite possible for those 2-400Gig Steam downloads to max a 1gig link off the local caches.

So in summary the 1G/0.5G GPON is certainly good enough for any home application, but a 2G/2G or higher link means no one user can practically do anything that will affect other users in the house, yes not necessary but it sure is nice. I really think 2.5GBASET in the house is a sweet spot, it is easily/cheaply retrofitted into any workstation with a free USB3 port and run’s on any existing cat5.

From: NANOG <nanog-bounces+tony=wicks.co.nz@nanog.org> On Behalf Of Michael Thomas
Sent: Saturday, 26 December 2020 8:28 am
To: nanog@nanog.org
Subject: Re: [External] Re: 10g residential CPE

Can I ask a really dumb question? Consider it an xmas present. I know this sounds like "nobody needs more than 640k", but how can household possibly need a gig let alone 10g? I'm still on 25mbs DSL, have cut the cord so all tv, etc is over the net. If I really cared and wanted 4k I could probably upgrade to a 50mbs service and be fine. Admittedly it's just the two of us here, but throw in a couple of kids and I still don't see how ~100mbs isn't sufficient let alone 1 or 10G. Am I missing something really stupid?

Mike