The killer feature for me at least is the ability to use remote machines (and especially their storage) as if they were on my LAN. Unfortunately, as the sibling comment mentioned some things that should be better aren&#x27;t because bumping up the local connection speed is not always sufficient as the remote machine&#x27;s connection speed and the intermediate protocol overhead also makes a large difference. Additionally, I&#x27;ve been quite disappointed in the performance of some of our quite expensive enterprise level NAS appliances (topping out at ~200Mpbs or so).<p>Worse are cloud storage services, especially things like Dropbox &#x2F; Box.com &#x2F; github &#x2F; iTunes downloads that have extensive throttling, especially on uploads, sometimes as low as 10-15Mbps. (these are super irritating because they feel like they should be fast but are clearly being traffic shaped to a perfect 10.0000Mbps).<p>There are some cases where you get much better speeds. OS downloads tend to be unthrottled, Bittorrent stuff and downloads from some CDNs can keep up. Steam is pretty good as well.<p>For work purposes where you can control the remote machines and protocols used, and have the ability to upgrade the remote storage systems to handle gigabit speeds, it makes a number of actions that used to take to long to bother with actually possible.<p>Examples:
- Grab a packet capture of a busy network interface and pull it down locally for analysis in wireshark
- Download, edit, re-upload large media files in raw&#x2F;intermediate working formats
- In some cases work directly off of mounted network drives rather than using local scratch storage
- Really anything where you want to use thick local applications to edit serious amounts of data.<p>For a purely residential setting (where you might be dealing with wifi, spinning hard drives&#x2F;thumb drives, and only have access to slow consumer level cloud storage services) there are probably diminishing returns after ~200Mbit. All that said, while the upload difference between 100Mbit and 1000Mbit might not be that great right now, the difference between 10Mbit and 100Mbit is pretty significant and sadly, at least in the places I&#x27;ve lived your options are often ~10Mbit or ~1000Mbit for upload without much in between.<p>If consumer level hardware and cloud services pick up the pace I expect 1000Mbit connections to be a lot more useful. Those developments might not happen if there aren&#x27;t enough annoyed people with 1000Mbit connections watching a 10Mbit dripbox uploads and complaining.