The caps make a huge, huge difference. That's why mobile LTE plans are sold almost completely in terms of the cap. Consider a 100 mbps cable connection with a

The caps make a huge, huge difference. That's why mobile LTE plans are sold almost completely in terms of the cap. Consider a 100 mbps cable connection with a classic comcast 250 GiB cap. Now obviously home internet is designed and sold to be bursty. But if you do the math, this is only 6 hours of max-speed traffic, for an entire month. Or look at it from the other extreme, no bursting - it's less than 1 mbps spread over an entire month. Frankly, 100 mbps is overkill, I'd be happy with a solid symmetric 40 mbps. The reason the numbers are so high is people who aren't network engineers think "hmm my internet is still not enough somehow, I should get more" but the rated speed is not the problem. In fact I recently switched from 200mbps/20mpbs cable to 100mbps/100mpbs fios, for the significantly faster and more consistent upload speed. I don't miss the extra 100mbps download speed at all. Summary: speed matters less the higher you go. The caps matter more.