If you think gigabit speeds (or two gigabit speeds) are largely a marketing ploy you're right, since there's few services that can utilize even half that amount of bandwidth. But the offering of gigabit service appears to drive adoption of slower speeds as well, numerous ISPs have now stated. TDS Telecom recently stated that adoption of its $35 a month 100 Mbps tier have surged since it started offering gigabit speeds.
Apparently users call in to see what the excitement is about, realize they probably don't need that much speed (or don't want to pay that price), then stumble off with a fast-but-not-ridiculously-fast slower tier.
"As soon as you begin to shout you have a 1 Gig service it begins to draw people's attention and when you explain to them why 1 Gig is closer to reality than you think, they begin to examine what service they have and they call for more bandwidth," Hawaiin Telecom CEO Scott Barber tells Fierce Cable.
In what will be a sort of blasphemy for our regular readers, the exec points out that there's a lot of people out there for whom "gigabit" is meaningless, since they have absolutely no idea what speed they currently have.
"Only one customer knew exactly what they had but all of them were guessing," Barber said. "People will order service knowing specifically what they are ordering, and a year or two later they forgot, so when you're able to talk about 1 Gig in the marketplace being available people begin to pay attention to what they have and the phones start to light up."
Of course the kind of people who don't know what speed they have may be looking to faster speeds to resolve issues like interconnection and streaming performance, which obviously have nothing to do with breaking the gigabit threshold.