Everyone's needs are different. Yes, a lot of people can get along just fine with 20 megabit up and down, and you are spot on that latency may be the worse issue.
In my case, my work requires me to frequently upload files of about 15GB in size. On my old cable connection - which did provide gigabit downloads - the uploads were capped at 30 megabits. So it took about two hours to upload one of these files, with people waiting for it.
Now that I have a symmetric gigabit fiber connection, these files take only 10 minutes to upload. That's a game changer.
It's because I'm uploading to https://www.box.com/ where IBM has an Enterprise account.
I am amazed that Box has nailed a good portion of the Enterprise market with a substandard product: poor transfer speeds and an astoundingly bad UX on their web access.
I do get the expected speeds when uploading to or downloading from other servers.
In my case, my work requires me to frequently upload files of about 15GB in size. On my old cable connection - which did provide gigabit downloads - the uploads were capped at 30 megabits. So it took about two hours to upload one of these files, with people waiting for it.
Now that I have a symmetric gigabit fiber connection, these files take only 10 minutes to upload. That's a game changer.