Fiber is weird. (Actually, all internet service is a little bit weird, but fiber more so than most technologies.) Every kind of connection you could install between two points has some achievable speed that varies with distance. With DSL the distance scaling is harsh; an extra mile could cut the top speed by 25%. With fiber the distance hardly matters at all, unless you’re running the connection across a continent (or an ocean). Because your ISP’s end of the fiber is in the same city as you, that same fiber that carries 5Mbps could just as easily carry 5Tbps (literally 5,000,000Mbps). It just costs more for the boxes at each end of the fiber.

A consumer–grade ONT that the ISP installs at your house will scale from 5Mbps to 1Gbps¹ at the touch of a button. The tech gave your customer a deal, but the weird thing is that he didn’t reduce the ISPs profit margin. They still paid up front for installation, they’re still paying a small amount for electricity each month (on the order of a dollar or two a month, but note that the customer pays a similar amount to power the ONT), and they’re still getting the same amount of money from the customer. The link speed doesn’t actually effect the profit any more.

As a result, most ISPs that offer fiber are simplifying their offerings. They’ll maybe have 100Mbps, 500Mbps, and 1Gbps plans, and there won’t be much difference in price between them. The price difference between the slowest and fastest speeds might only be 30–40% more even though the speed is literally 10× faster. In the future I could see ISPs offering 100Mbps, 1Gbps, and 10Gbps plans. And nothing else. Or even dropping the low–speed plans entirely. It just doesn’t cost them extra to offer higher speeds, so at some point simplicity wins out over price differentiation.

¹ ONTs supporting speeds faster than 1Gpbs are available but not yet very common, since commodity home networking equipment is so often limited to 1000base-T Ethernet which runs at 1Gbps.