Where I live, it is promise that has yet to happen. They've been working on a fiber optic network for the last two years but it has yet to be deployed and my ISP probably won't get to use it until it's been up for a while.
IPTV, IPphone, Internet. In germany new telephon contracts include no longer analog signals since some years, the digital line ISDN same, and existing contracts will change the next year, beginning 2018 all digital lines as ISDN were dead. the problem behind is that some connections dont have enough bandwidth to offer all or both, either ip-phone or internet, but the iptv is pretty pointless. thats why cable providers here are rising. the major issue is that those providers offers up to 250mbps now but hit will be shared band width in most areas and the infra structure itself, backbones aso are not capable to deliver such speed for all. thats why contracts include the words "up to" <speed> the outer rims in general are kicked, only copper cable, in most cases no fiber or cable provider, some only have radio link (beam radio). providers hesitate to lay proper cable, to expensive and less income. poor for a "social" called land.
The funny thing is that the old analog phone and tv systems were better in certain ways, so newer isn't always better. I think VOIP kinda sucks, having to plug your phone system into a modem is pretty ridiculous. Same goes for the DVR/set-top box, if there is something wrong with the modem it's game over, at least with IPTV. With cable you can plug your DVR straight into to the wall, no need for a modem connection, so it's superior to IPTV over copper and fiber.
I could get AT&T's Gigapower fiber to the home 1Gbps service (they also offer a slightly cheaper 300Mbps service over fiber), but most of my home computers are using Wi-Fi and even via 802.11ac, a realistic max throughput is only around 100Mbps per single stream. The quoted high rates by Wi-Fi vendors are: (1) generally marketing fluff / overinflated theoretical rates, and (2) typically in reference to aggregated handling of single streams (i.e., handling 4 x 100Mbps = 400Mbps Wi-Fi). So, other than the fact that these high Gigapower rates are symmetric and apply for upstream as well as downstream (which would be really nice), I don't have much use beyond the 45/6 I already have. Everyone focuses on ISP bandwidth, but what most consumers -- and even many, if not most, networking-knowledgable folks -- don't realize is that for TCP networking (which is likely 80-90% of most users' app traffic) the roundtrip latency to/from your destination server places a cap on realized throughput. Most people just think of latency in terms of gaming lag, but it has a much bigger effect than that on wide area TCP networking. TCP defines something called the "TCP window" controlling how much data can be sent at a time without receiving an acknowledgement from the recipient. So, a very rough approximation on TCP WAN throughput is given by the equation: TCP-window-size-in-bits / Roundtrip-latency-in-seconds. So, if you had an initial default TCP window size of 64KB (524,288 bits) and a cross-country latency of 60ms (0.060 sec) then you're roughly limited to only around 8Mbps of TCP throughput. Now, modern operating systems implement a sliding or scaling TCP window which ramps up as long you don't encounter packet loss and retransmit requests. Even so, with a 1MB TCP window, you are still limited to roughly around 133Mbps at 60ms latency. It just gets worse from there if there are even minute packet loss rates or even seemingly minor increased latency. Which all goes to show that increased ISP bandwidth is great... as long as the sources of content you are seeking are localized. All the big providers (Netflix, Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc), of course, make extensive use of geographically dispersed Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). So you will likely be bound by your own ISP provider bandwidth for those sources. But still there is a ton of content out there -- which may be only slightly geographically remote (say from Chicago to a server in Seattle) -- that you aren't necessarily going to speed up any, by purchasing a bigger pipe to your ISP (well, at least realistically above 100Mbps or so).
