Wait, while you're playing the game it averages ~200Mbps?

 

So if you play for 3 hours, you'll download/upload 270 Gigabytes of data?

 

It just seems to me your statement "any house with a single steam user is going to see utilization of at least 200Mbps over long time periods" would mean that for it to average 200Mbps pver 30 days, you'd have had to download/upload 65Terabytes of data in that 30 days.

 

That seems a lot for a game?

 

No sorry, I didn't make that clear.

While actually playing games there is very little data use at all, typically a few Mbps at most. And the average over a month is still going to be very low unless you spend the whole time installing and uninstalling games. But during installation, or the frequent updates the connection will run at very high speeds for potentially hours at a time. Between all the consoles and gaming PCs around I would say most houses now have a device that can and does sustain hundreds of Mbps over hours at a time when the connection supports it.

Your average over the month is always going to be pretty low, but there are now quite a few services cant can happily burst to significantly higher speeds and can be improved by a connection over 100Mbps.

The old annoyingly common idea that the most you will ever need is 25Mbps because that what Netflix 4K tops out at is out of date, plenty of services see significant improvements with a gigabit service, gaming being the most common and visible. But even Netflix is better on a faster line, 25Mbps or so is what it uses in a steady streaming state, start a new video, or seek within one and it will burst as high as it can to fill the buffer, ive seen 70Mbps from Netflix seeking during a standard HD video.

Its not a massive difference like the move from ADSL to fibre, there is nothing you can do on gigabit that you cant do on 100Mbps. But if the extra $10-20 cost isn't an issue, and there is more than one person in your house, or there are gamers, or you do frequent uploads then it is noticeable and worth it.