Ummm, I pretty sure that is not what he was referring to.
The bandwidth available to you at your house is only one piece of the equation.
The real speed at which you can access and transfer data is also a matter of adding in all the other possible causes of bottle necking and delays between yourself and the source/repository of the data you wish to view or work with ... which are part of the path between yourself and that place. Add in the possible delays caused AT the site where that data actually resides. Such as what is the max bandwidth they have available, how many users of their services are connected at any one time, how large are the file streams being moved back and forth at any particular moment, etc.
Specifically, the OP spoke about someone in Australia who might be using a storage service that was located elsewhere ... other than in Australia. No matter what that person's local connection speed was, they'd be limited by the slowest bottleneck between themselves and that data storage location.
Now, I quite routinely visit certain Web sites located in Australia (I'm in North America). As there are web sites there maintained by folks in the same line of business I'm in, who have quite useful info I'm interested in. Etc. And there is always a quite noticeable delay upon initial connection before the data streams commence.
That is also true of some other places.
Even within the same relative geographic locale, one can run into bottlenecks, slowdowns, etc for any variety of reasons.
Can be at your own end, at the destination, or most anywhere in between.
Recently I had to explain this to my wife.
Now, at home I have a much slower service than you evidently do. Originally, up until last year, a 5 mbps cable modem connection. Which was plenty speedy enough to suit me, for what I do at home that requires an internet connection. Then I came home one day to find the wife had called the service provider and upped it to 10 mbps. Okay, fine, if she felt she needed that, no problem for me. I was kinda curious why, what she might be doing, that required the increased speed. Its not as if we watch movies, listen to music, or make phone calls over that Net connection. But, WTH, it was only an added $10 (we're not billed by volume of data, only by speed of the connection).
Then one morning I awoke and grabbed coffee and went into the den where we have his and her computers and desks set up and she was grumbling. I won't mention which online service she uses, as it really doesn't matter, but she has one she uses mostly frequently for email, general file storage, etc. This is all personal stuff. She writes and receives emails to and from friends, family and so forth. Plus they swap music, picture, and video files. Rather than download such and storing it on her own system locally, most of it she leaves on the service provider's system where she has made numerous folders in order to keep things somewhat organized.
Anyway, she was trying to read emails with largish attachments. Specifically, in this case, a video made by our daughter of her youngest taking her first steps. The video was coming through, but sluggishly, etc. And the wife was trying to also forward it to a number of people.
In any event, things weren't going well, and she was getting grumpy. Mumbled that maybe she had been better off signing up for an even faster service.
I commented, "Patience, Dear. Let me check to see what is happening."
She doesn't actually know anything about computers or networks except for using the apps she uses. So I dropped down to the command line on my system and did a little pinging and this and that. Then informed her it wasn't our connection speed that was the problem. The problem seemed to be at the other end, the service she was using for email, file storage, etc. I don't know exactly what their problem was, wasn't actually all that interested so as to investigate more. Line problems? Too many on line trying to use that service at that moment? Equipment failure? Don't know, don't really care. It happens.
I reminded her, once again, that I'd told her before that anything she considered important to her, she should copy to local storage. And from there I'd take care of it as I backup our home machines routinely.
On another occasion, I found her grumbling and upon checking determined the fault lay with our ISP. They'd had an equipment failure, and were in the midst of replacing the failed stuff, but in the meantime service was slow, sluggish, on and off again.
Etc. Etc. Stuff happens. She's handicapped and is often on some game site, where folks not only play online games, but make friends, engage in online chatter, etc. Took me quite a while to get it through her head that when the times occurred, as they regularly do, when things got real sluggish that it really wasn't an issue with the speed of her own hardware or that of our network connection ... most times. It was a matter of the system providing the game services getting overloaded. As I showed her several times by the simple expedient of having her close down that game room and then opening up another provided by a different service and she'd find everything working fine there.
She's now become more adept at figuring out for herself where the origination of such problems are. And, as well, has started to routinely go through all her saved emails, attachments, etc and mirroring them locally ... those she really wants to save ... so that I can back them up at home.
She's also finally coming to the realization that MOST times, for what we do over the network, the 10 mbps is more than adequate. That more often than not any excessive delays and so forth originate elsewhere.
Now, I'd suppose that if for entertainment purposes we listened to or watched streamed music, movies, or TV over the Internet connection we might want a faster connection but we don't do that. We have regular cable TV, for TV watching. And regular TV's. I have no interest in watching TV on my computer screen. If I'm on the computer, I'm doing other stuff, a Window with a TV show on it would just get in the way and be distracting. Same for movies. Neither of us watches just all that much TV or that many movies. And when we do we tend to prefer to get comfy in the recliners, look at a much larger screen, and to concentrate on the show. Or, why bother?
Phone service, for ourselves, I keep separate. We have regular copper line service plus each has his/her own cell phones.
My wife wondered why I insisted on keeping the copper line along with the cell phones. Nowadays she understands. Cell service had routine and regular interruptions caused by any number of factors. From local system overloading, to cell towers going down due to weather storm, or whatever. Copper lines go down to, but much less frequently. But the odds of BOTH being down simultaneously are minor. As I live in an area where major storms ... tornado, blizzard, ice storm, etc are just a fact of life ... I prefer to have a backup plan/ability.
