Doc Searls hones in on the things being missed by network providers and the people who report on them:

One recurring theme we've seen in our forums is that the new speeds have many users downgrading . In both forum threads and polls, many customers on Comcast's 16Mbps/2Mbps tier say they're downgrading to their 12Mbps/2Mbps tier apparently because they don't think an additional 4Mbps downstream is worth $10. Customers used to be willing to pay the additional $10 for double the upstream speed, but there's no longer an upstream difference between the tiers.

Doc points out further down that the downstream bandwidth stops mattering as much - between 12 mbps and 16, you don't see a lot of difference. Heck, I have FIOS 20/20 now, and I see little difference in the downloads from my old Comcast service and the new FIOS. The win is on the upstream side:

In fact there isn't a lot of perceived difference between 12Mbps and 16Mbps on the downstream side. Either is fast enough for a YouTube video. But on the upstream side, you can see the difference. In my case, that difference appears in the progress bars for pictures I upload to Flickr.

In my case, the difference is in the daily uploads of "Smalltalk Daily". That was a real chore with Comcast's exciting 1 MBPS upload speed; it's now barely noticeable. As time goes by, I won't be uploading less video, and it's likely that my standard def videos will eventually become HD ones.

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