10 years ago, having a 20 megabit internet connection was pretty darn solid. But these days, it seems like 200 megabits or 10 times faster is on the low end of what many ISPs offer. And there's no sign of stopping. So considering how quickly both speeds and demand have risen lately, how fast could our internet be in just a few years time?
So have you heard of Moore's Law, that famous observation that CPU would have twice as many transistors every two years, there's actually a similar law called Nielsen's Law that says top end home internet speeds get 50% faster each year. 
And this trend has held up very well since the internet first started gaining popularity, better than Moore's Law in fact.
Interestingly, ISPs even use Nielsen's Law to project what speed tiers they should aim to offer customers in the future. And right now, it looks like five gigabit could be the next big thing, but hold on a second, there are plenty of gigabit devices out there right now. You can go out and buy network switches and cables that support 10 gigabit ethernet and the newest standards for sending data through a cable modem also support 10 gig. So why are we talking about speeds leveling off at only five gigs?
While there are a very small number of ISPs that do offer 10 gigabit internet, most of them don't have anything near that fast for a couple of reasons. One, is that they don't want the underlying tech to get overloaded. So they try to make sure capacity is double the top customer tier. So if the infrastructure actually supports 10 gig, a major ISP might only offer five gig as its high-end option, but there's one other big reason the ISPs wanna keep things at five gigabit.
So the other big reason speeds may level off at five gigabits in the near future is simply demand. You see, the average connection these days is somewhere around 200 megabits. And even if you're trying to stream multiple 4k videos, those only take around 25 megs per stream. So the average 200 megabit plan seems to be more than enough for many customers, limiting the number of paying customers screaming for a multi gig connection. And when people do experience slowdowns on a 200 mega connection, it's very often a result of say, putting their wireless router in a silly location rather than the pipe not being fat enough.
Even though it's hard to think of a pipe that's too fat, but what about upload speeds which are still on average less than 20 megabits a second for a home connection in the US? With smartphones that record 4k video, increasing numbers of people that work from home and three IoT devices for every person on earth by 2025, there's definitely demand for a larger upstream pipe. So we might see this before we see super gotti download speeds.
I'd still expect to see five gigabit download speeds being off sometime around 2024 if Nielsen's Law holds up, especially as multiple 4k HDR streams, large game downloads, and video chats are becoming more common and eat through bandwidth quickly.
Major ISPs such as Comcast and Spectrum in the United States have already successfully tested speeds at or near 10 gigabit. And it can all be done over existing cabling using a hybrid approach where fiber carries internet traffic to a node at which point plain old coaxial cable takes over and carries that data to your house at high speed.
But how can we go even faster in the future if most equipment currently has a 10 gig maximum? Well, there's a new standard called 802.3ca for higher speed fiber. The idea is to use multiple wavelengths of light, each one carrying 25 gigabits per second. You could combine say four of them for a 100 gigabit link and then sort them out with passive splitters to provide home internet connections of 25 or 50 gigabits each.
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