Mine is 4Mbit/s in South Africa, we're getting 8Mbit/s soon and possibly 10Mbit/s. It's pretty expensive; ~$200 p/m for an shaped and uncapped connection.
I don't know what it's like in other countries, but no one here seems to get what their connection is "up-to". The closest I know of is a friend in London who gets about 18Mbps.
In my area, they're apparently installing FTTC (cabinet) this summer. It basically means it'll only be copper for the final 100 metres or so and will offer "up-to" 40Mbps. I'll wait and see...
He upgraded to 50Mbps/1.5Mbps upstream and his problems went away.
I recently visited South Africa and noticed that the connection to the rest of the world was really slow. SA-based sites loaded at reasonable speeds, but gmail and such took forever. Is that an actual, real problem, or did I just end up on a connection from a bad ISP? I realise that the physical distance alone introduces lag, but visiting web pages hosted in Australia (pretty much as far as you can get from here) isn't noticeably slower from Europe, you just don't want to play FPS games over that sort of distance.
The alternative is to pay a lot of money and have a download cap (5GB ~$67 p/m/ 10GB ~$85 p/m).
Right now, on an unshaped account I've got a 200ms ping to google.com; on a shaped account it'll be ~800ms.
In real world use it normally pulls app. 5-6 MB per second off the general internet.
At our office we pay something like $2k for a business grade 100Mb/s symmetrical uncapped.
That would make me happy. :)
If Google provides a service with a high upload speed, I can see myself hosting my own server from home. Crappy upload speed is the only thing stopping me from hosting servers myself from my home line.
I also remember being envious of some friends up north in Sweden in Luleå that lived in some sort of student apartments where they had 100/100Mbit connections back in 2000 or so, and I think they got upgraded to gigabit, but that's sort of special since it was subsidized by the university to attract students.
You also have people like Peter Löthberg (heavily involved in connecting SUNET to the internet in the 80s) who installed a 40Gb connection at his mother's as an experiment to see how she would use it.
Anyway, there's very little general availability, there's a few limited municipal networks that have the capacity for gigabit. 100/100Mbit is available for a lot of people, and everyone living in a larger city can get 20/3Mbit dsl or cable or similar.
I saw that one cable company has started rolling out 100Mbit, so that'll pressure the existing 100Mbit providers to up their bandwidth.
We used to live in a building with 140 apartments, and it shocked me that we had to work for close to 6 months to find more than 10 people interested in getting a true 1Gbps link installed. The rates would end up being cheaper than the ADSL/cable people already had, but still no go.
Originally, we were supposed to bring on board more than 20 people, but the company installing the link felt so bad for us that they went ahead with the few we managed to find anyways.
And then we moved to get out of the city. Back to unstable and horrible cable. Bleh.
Uh-huh. What's the quota (bandwidth limit)? Knowing Australia, it's something like 30GB/month, meaning that theoretically you could burn through your entire monthly allocation in under 5 minutes.
iiNet and Internode are also playing around with fibre in some new housing estates, here's an internode pricelist:
http://www.internode.on.net/pdf/products/home-fibre-pricelis... [PDF]
Oh boy, $99 a month for 15GB of data, but it's delivered really quickly!
