The problem with people not knowing how to utilize gigabit networks is that it's sort of a "cart before the horse" type of problem. Until enough people actuall

The problem with people not knowing how to utilize gigabit networks is that it's sort of a "cart before the horse" type of problem. Until enough people actually HAVE symmetrical (both up and down) gigabit speeds, you will be limited by the transmission speed of whichever provider you are downloading from. A lot of web servers are sitting in racks in data centers, and you will only ever be able to download a file from that web server at the speed that that web server is able to send. Assuming the web server has a single gigabit connection, and ten other people are downloading from that server at the same time, you might only be getting 50-100 megabits tops. Where gigabit networks for consumers would REALLY start to shine is when thousands of people are on gigabit, and are all doing peer-to-peer transactions, or hosting their own servers. Imagine if there were 100,000 people with decent computers (at least a terabyte of drive space apiece), with every computer connected via fully bi-directional gigabit speed connections. Now imagine if you were to build a fully encrypted peer to peer file storage cloud network on top of that, with each client having their own key (which only they had access to). Encrypted data would be stored in pieces across the cloud, with redundancy and parity correction stored across nodes. If you built something like that properly, you would have a giant, disaster resistant cloud drive, where you could store tons of private data and access it from anywhere at gigabit speeds. If you had a large file that was striped in redundancy across a thousand nodes, you could even achieve terabit speeds by downloading the pieces in parallel and assembling them on your end. You could even tie a pricing model into it (perhaps powered by a blockchain methodology), where you had to pay monthly to store your data in the peer to peer cloud, and people who contributed storage and machine resources would receive payments in return for their contribution. You could even take it a step FURTHER and add a cloud processing layer on top of it all, where people could dedicate a couple of their CPU cores for usage by the cloud (when their machine wasn't in use), and they would be compensated. If you had that, you would have the ability to not only store data in the cloud, but also process the data (and even do things like run distributed web servers). The possibilities are endless! But it will never happen until it makes sense, and for it to make sense, there needs to be a critical mass of people who actually HAVE symmetrical gigabit connections.