Greg Reinacker notes:

…and the future is really blazin’ fast connections.
We used to have 4 T1’s ganged together somehow in our office, giving us around 6 Mb/sec. Shared by 75 people, and responsible for not only internet but also telephone traffic, you can imagine it wasn’t exactly fast.
At home I have a Comcast cable modem, and I get something like 8 Mb/sec, which until today I thought was pretty fast.
But this morning, when I got to the office, our IT folks had completed our office network cutover to a 100 Mb/sec fiber connection to the internet…and oh. my. gosh.

He is right. Once you’ve seen really high speed access, real broadband, those reasonably useful cable connections are clearly not that fast.
The baseline that we should be looking at for home connections is the 100 Mbps Greg now has in his office. You are not going to use it at that rate continuously anytime soon but it will help bring the Internet much closer to a real time interactive multimedia environment.
Bandwidth intensive businesses as well as many academic and research institutions now have 1 or more 10 Gigabit/sec connections.

If your workstation is optimized to take advantage of these high speed connections, and most are not, you will get some truly blazing download speeds.