NBN Tasmania officially launched Australia's first national broadband network rollout today at Midway Point, northeast of Hobart, and in doing so the government also committed to a maximum access speed to one gigabit per second.
The speed of your network affects nearly every device on your home network, whether it be a home-theater PC, an external storage device, or a gaming console. For most networks, the transfer rate of a faster ethernet connection (roughly 12.5 megabits per second) is the typical speed limit. That may be okay for transferring ordinary files, but it's painfully slow if you're trying to back up a PC to a network device, for example, or to stream a high-definition movie to your living room.