Americans: What Internet connection speed is typical?

In the Bombcast you so often hear about the network is holding back consoles and digital distribution? So how fast do we need to be? In order to get rid of optical drives etc. 
 
(Here in Switzerland/Germany you get broadband with your landline phone contracts. Heck, my parents will move to 200 MBit/s glass fibre pretty soon.)

i can do the email

It's not necessarily the speed that's the problem, it's the ISP's capping bandwith. There are a ton of countries that have ridiculous caps that wouldn't allow you to download a next gen game without going over their limit, so it wouldn't be realistic for a company to really put a download only console out when you'd be cutting off that many people from using it.

Fast. I care more about bandwidth than speed now.

200Mbit/s Fiber? In other words: 200/200? That's overkill, unless it's a shared connection with many others? 25/25 is plenty.

That's what I can't understand. I believe in Europe in most cases there isn't a bandwidth cap. You can download a Tera a week for all they care. How this is not happening in America?

200Mbit/s Fiber? In other words: 200/200? That's overkill, unless it's a shared connection with many others? 25/25 is plenty.

Well I have a 30mbps connection, and speedtest.net says that it's faster than 97% of internet connections in america, so that probably gives you an idea.

That's what I can't understand. I believe in Europe in most cases there isn't a bandwidth cap. You can download a Tera a week for all they care. How this is not happening in America?

It's not necessarily the speed that's the problem, it's the ISP's capping bandwith. There are a ton of countries that have ridiculous caps that wouldn't allow you to download a next gen game without going over their limit, so it wouldn't be realistic for a company to really put a download only console out when you'd be cutting off that many people from using it.

Here in  Aus it is capped bandwidth. I have a pretty good speed by Aus standards (18mb/s) but I am capped at 50GB per month. In the area I live in this is the only ISP I can get and it is the most affordable plan I can get (still $80 a month). So yeah, download only games would totally suck with this current state of affairs.

I think the average speed is between 3 - 7.5 Mbps (pretty slow). I'm at 7.5 Mbps and a 12GB game on Steam would probably take me around 4 hours to download.

I pay $135 a month for 60GB of downloads on an ADSL2 line.

I live in America and today I learned we have bandwidth caps.

I can't say what a typical speed is, but in rural areas it's probably around 5.  In and around large cities it's probably a lot faster.
America is a big place, it's probably easier for a government to mandate speed in a smaller country.  I have no idea though, that's just a guess.

The most expensive package I can find, costs 134.99 and has 360mb internet speed, 110 TV channels, free of charge telephone (does anyone use that anymore?), free access to a similar Netflix service, plus 3 channels packs which include roughly 30 more TV channels.

20 down, 3.5 up here in Boston with no caps @$60/month. I'll take it!

I can't say what a typical speed is, but in rural areas it's probably around 5.  In and around large cities it's probably a lot faster. America is a big place, it's probably easier for a government to mandate speed in a smaller country.  I have no idea though, that's just a guess.

Comcast, one of the nation's largest internet service provider has a 250 gigabyte per month bandwidth cap.  Time Warner was testing caps that ranged from 5 gigs to 40 gigs depending on your service plan.  That experiment fell through after consumer outcry.   I don't know what their current standard is; if they have one or not.  AT&T recently introduced a cap at 150 gigabytes per month.  Going over ranges from additional fees to threating letters to disconnect you for a year.   Now, watching a movie off Netflix in HD can use up 3.5 gigs of service, so watching just 1 HD movie per night will use up more than two-thirds of your cap.  That's why it's troubling to the direction of new media.  Now, the content providers themselves should improve their compression software so as to not just flood the network with massive clogging files, but on the same token, the service providers need to upgrade their networks to handle the new and expanding technology. 

Cant get fiber where i live, think my dsl is like 7Mbits down which still only takes a few hours for 10 gigs.

I have a 100/100 Mbits fiber connection, but I live pretty remote. 
 
Not American, though.

I've got Charter in Western North Carolina it's 15 down and 1 up. No caps. I pay about $50 a month.
 
EDIT
 
I should say that my connection is the lowest offered. If you pay more, you get a faster connection.

 (Here in Switzerland/Germany you get broadband with your landline phone contracts. Heck, my parents will move to 200 MBit/s glass fibre pretty soon.)

.40mb-3.5mb 

I get like 4.5 Mb down and 0.8Mb up and we have the best non cable package in England. Says a lot really.

Obviously I meant non fiber...

The problem isn't really with the majority. The problem is that lots of rural area's still don't have broadband, or if they do it's very slow broadband. We generally take broadband for granted, but there are people who don't have access to it. That's the same in most countries. I imagine it's the same in Switzerland & Germany. It's prohibitively expensive to put in the high quality lines to rural area's. There are alternatives such as satellite broadband, but they're very expensive and have very low data allowances.

There is no such thing as overkill until your hard drives cannot write data fast enough to meet the speed of your connection.

How can you say 25/25 is plenty, you know every single persons usage scenarios? Come on.

Anyway I'm in the UK and this is the mid end connection of my ISP (Virgin Media)

I just wish my upload was better. :/

The worst thing about American internet is the ping differences between west and east coast and the data caps.

The average US speed test is 10.49 Mp/s, and in my state of Wisconsin the average is 15.83 (not sure why WI is so much higher than the average)

I was in middle america states for a bit in metro areas generally - between 1 and 10mbit down, 256k to 512kbit up was typical speed. 3mbit up and 256k up actual speeds are pretty common for many people I know.

Try uploading a video or mirroring a game feed to a friend with 256k up. hahahahahh.

In Canada (BC lower mainland) I pay $60/month for 25 down / 3 up and 500 GB limit

It's pretty hard to state a meaningful number. America is an enormous place, at almost 10,000,000 square kilometers. Some places are stuck on dial-up. Some have DSL or T1s. Others have fiber. That place in Kansas has gigabit. SF and Portland and Seattle and Denver have high speed broad band. Then again, lots of places within each of these cities have pockets of shit options and anything outside of a major metropolitan area will generally have pretty poor options.

Also, you only have one choice in a given region, because they are given monopolies. If you live in a Comcast city, you get Comcast. If you live in a Cox area, you get Cox, and so on.

Near Denver, I get 50mbps down and 10mbps up with no data cap (but I'm paying $220/mo for a business account at my home). The business account is because it's the only way to get an account with Comcast that doesn't have bandwidth limits and that is faster than 27mbps/7mbps.