Imagine that you decide to get a security camera system for some reason. Maybe you have a valuable collection of something or you have a small business with lots of easily moved/sold equipment. You can easy buy or assemble a DVR system with up to a few dozen cameras from a number of sources.
These systems can be very valuable in ways you may not expect. My parent's recently captured video of a car accident in front of their house. This video greatly benefited a long-time neighbor and friend.
Anyway you get a system that has good video coverage of your building's doors and windows and can record say a few days worth of video. You're golden, right? Unfortunately you are vulnerable in a fundamental way. An intruder can find the video recorder box and destroy it. I personally know individuals this has happened to. So you come home from a long week and find your building broken into and the video lost. What can you do about this?
Simple... find a neighbor/AWS/colo box/etc and stream the video there too. It records a few TB of data and provides a backup in case of theft or destruction. This differs from typical backup situations of home users because of the bandwith involved.
Because ideally you would stream the video directly from the cams. If you have 10 cams producing 2 mbps, thats 20mbps. That's a lot of upload for the typical home connection, but for a symmetrical gigabit connection it's a drop in the bucket.
This is just one example. Having the bandwidth available makes so many things easy that were previously very difficult.
Modern games are huge and SSDs are small. Buy all your games on steam. When you want to play a game just tell steam to get it and it downloads at 50+ megabytes / second. Play your 20GB game in less than 7 minutes. When you're done just delete it.
There is no reason why games couldn't be designed for this use case and be playble immediately, downloading in the background.
Transit bandwidth for a tier 2 ISP costs under $500 x 1 Gbs / month. Considering usage patterns and that the bandwidth is shared across users its a negligible cost from what I understand. I work for an ISP and from what I can tell all the money goes to employing people and the left over goes to infrastructure.
These systems can be very valuable in ways you may not expect. My parent's recently captured video of a car accident in front of their house. This video greatly benefited a long-time neighbor and friend.
Anyway you get a system that has good video coverage of your building's doors and windows and can record say a few days worth of video. You're golden, right? Unfortunately you are vulnerable in a fundamental way. An intruder can find the video recorder box and destroy it. I personally know individuals this has happened to. So you come home from a long week and find your building broken into and the video lost. What can you do about this?
Simple... find a neighbor/AWS/colo box/etc and stream the video there too. It records a few TB of data and provides a backup in case of theft or destruction. This differs from typical backup situations of home users because of the bandwith involved.
Because ideally you would stream the video directly from the cams. If you have 10 cams producing 2 mbps, thats 20mbps. That's a lot of upload for the typical home connection, but for a symmetrical gigabit connection it's a drop in the bucket.
This is just one example. Having the bandwidth available makes so many things easy that were previously very difficult.