A claimed 40Mb (or 20Mb, depending on which part of the pamphlet you read...) And I got to thinking: apart from the 'glamour' of superfast speed, how valuable is this to most of us ordinary punters?
It's useless to the average person. Currently, 40 Mbps is only useful for downloads of massive files (such as pirated movies or software, which can run into gigabytes of data). DVD-quality video requires about 6 Mbps; Blu-ray-quality video requires about 36 Mbps. But in fact, most streaming video on the Web is streamed at speeds ten times slower, around 300-600 Mbps.
The lack of a need for such high speeds is not the only issue. The other is actually getting this speed in practice. The advertised 40 Mbps is typically only the speed from the nearest telephone central office or cable center to you—but to get any use out of this speed, it has to be guaranteed for the entire path between you and whichever other computer you're communicating with. Most Web sites that offer streaming content or downloads are configured to throttle the download/streaming speeds to some level that prevents a few high-speed users from overloading the network or servers. You'd be hard pressed to find any site that actually allows downloads at 40 Mbps, and even harder pressed to get a path to that site that provides 40 Mbps of throughput from start to finish.
So, at least for now, 40 Mbps is a waste of money. Software and content tend to bloat to use any capacity available, though, so once everyone has 40 Mbps, it will probably become nearly mandatory in order to do anything on the Net. But that is still some years away at the earliest.
If you operate a server, things are different—but then your problem is getting 40 Mbps or other high speeds for upload, and not just download. Synchronous connections that allow high upload speeds are no more expensive for the telco than asynchronous plans that provide fast download and slow upload, but providers know that anyone who wants high upload speeds is running a server, and so they gouge such users in pricing in consequence. A guaranteed 2 Mbps in both directions will usually cost you many times more than a 40 Mbps down and .25 Mbps up connection.
I have a nominal 8 Mbps ADSL connection (1 Mbps up). I easily get this speed in transfers between my PC and telco test servers or speed-measurement sites, so the bandwidth really is there most of the time. But most of the useful sites to which I connect (YouTube, sites with heavy download content, etc.) are either throttled to prevent me from getting that full speed, or are separated from me by intermediate nodes that will not pass a full 8 Mbps with any regularity. It's nice when I get it, but I don't often get it. A speed of 40 Mbps would of course be even less likely to ever run at full speed in real-world situations.