For the average user it doesn't make all that much difference. The reason is
that you typically aren't limited by the speed of your ISP, you are limited by
the server speed of whoever you are connected to. (It doesn't matter if your
pizza delivery guy drives a Ferrari if it takes his kitchen an hour to make
your pizza.) There probably is a threshold below which the home user will see
a difference but I don't know what that is. It is probably at the lower end of
the average cable ISP's speed. After you get 2 or 5 or whatever MBPS download
speed, you probably can't tell the difference anymore.
If a person does a lot of downloading and you know that the sites that you
download from are fast, then a faster ISP is of benefit.
If you play online games with other people, then low latency (low ping times)
are of benefit.
If you have reason to upload a lot of stuff, for instance here at work we send
large data files back to our clients, then you need a high upload speed.
> So now what? What's this information good for?
>
> http://www.speed.io/index_en.html
> 8369 KBit/s
> 983 KBit/s
> 38ms
>
> http://www.speedtest.net/
> 8.02 Mbps
> .95 Mbps
> 121ms
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