note that we don’t need 50mbps (and certainly not 200) for most homes/families either. 25mbps comfortably supports 3 1080p streams with room left over for web, email, and other apps.
Even ideal, uninterrupted deliveries don't happen in a steady stream. Data arrives in bursts. I've seen 25Mbit connections choke on far less.
God help anyone with a 25Mbit/down cable connection who tries sync their media to the cloud. That <5MBit upload will not only take forever, the saturated outbound pipe impedes ACK packets for incoming traffic - which forces inbound video and other connections to stutter while waiting for their endlessly retransmitted ACKs to arrive.
Real life also commonly includes gaming. Steam updates alone max'd out our 500Mb connection.
i've been sharing 25mbps with another person and the occasional guest for the past couple years, often including multiple video streams at a time. there have been some relatively rare upstream buffering issues (as most issues are with wifi), but overall, it's been just fine.
gaming doesn't seem like a good case for making a general bandwidth argument. sure, if you want to spend your money on bandwidth for it, go to town, but the general populace doesn't 'need' it. video at least is used for communication, education, and other non-recreational purposes.
It's not about the 50 mbps download bandwidth here. It's a combination of bandwidth, latency, and variance in latency on both the upload and download links. Usually residential 50 mbps is a peak download bandwidth of 50 mbps with pretty high variance latency. 50 mbps symmetric with low latency would be fantastic among 3 individuals, but when realistic speeds are 30/5 mbps down/up with bursts of high latency, you're in for a frustrating time.
I was on 25mbps during lockdown with my parents for a few months and it was very painful. You probably don’t need the 500 I get now but 25 is not good.
