To be honest, I run entire sites off a 100Mb leased line that do traffic like nobody's business 24 hours a day. You'd be hard pushed to care about the top-download speed more than the latency, DNS lookup time, etc. Usually the top-download speed makes little difference to web browsing as your browser is being asked to fetch a hundred pages/images per tab from all over the web before it can draw anything on the screen. It's the session connection setup/teardown and associated latency that "feels" slow, not the actual download speed.
You only need more if you download lots of static huge files (e.g. downloading Gbytes of stuff all the time), want a better upload (definitely better to be on a symmetric connection for anything that goes up, and *absolutely* for hosting anything on-site), or you are literally maxing out the connection for most of the days (most people/places aren't, I promise you).
Sure, I'll take a free upgrade to 1 Gbit/s, but I wouldn't pay for it until it was the bottleneck. It rarely is, especially if you bother to put in any kind of content caching, proxying (DNS/HTTP), firewalling, QoS, etc.
I once promised to triple a school's "speedtest" result once. It was literally a "job interview dare". They were moaning about how the line was constantly jammed up and slow and speed tests were showing pitiful numbers. I was allowed a cursory peek at the router. The line speed was fast, but I could see the entirely unmanaged network behind it, repeatedly asking for the same things over and over and over again. I bet them that I could improve it, giving specific targets. They employed me. Day 1, Job 1: Prove yourself. Eek!
I changed the DNS lookup to a local machine instead of every machine trying to get out to the ISP (the router was just passing on the ISP's DNS), put in a transparent caching HTTP proxy on the main line (to catch all the common page accesses) and set up WSUS local Windows Update caching and it dropped to 10% usage of the line. Their speed test results went from "pathetic" to "the full line speed" (give or take) because it wasn't competing with loads of junk any more. Did the same again when they started buying IP phones... 6 phones were struggling to keep calls going, breaking up, cutting out, etc. QoS the network and they had 50+ phones of the same models, no problem, no breakup, no upgrades required.
Even at home, it matters much more what you're sending/receiving/expecting of the connection than anything to do with its headline speed. QoS your TCP SYN/ACK (if possible) packets, implement a global DNS proxy (you can prioritise that too so it gets first-pick of the Internet connection to resolve new websites), stick in a caching proxy even if it does nothing else and is "optional" (i.e. not enforced by Windows, browsers, etc. so you can turn it off it it gives you gip). Prioritise your gaming ports too, you'll be amazed how much lag is caused by your UDP "non-urgent" packets being held up by the girlfriend browsing Facebook. She won't notice a 10ms lag, you will.
Then most things are going over your (presumably Gigabit) local network, with delays around 0.01 - 0.1ms, while the stuff you need to go out to the Internet fresh for is - at worst - as bad as having nothing at all the first time you do them, but all the small, urgent packets, connection initiations and multiple repeated lookups are cached locally or prioritised over bulk traffic.
If you have the option (e.g. Draytek router) Airtime Fair Sharing is also good... it basically shuts up noisy wireless devices on your network so they don't steal all the airtime from devices trying to do stuff. Less disconnections, faster wifi speeds and much better latency.
Most internet connections are akin to a room full of people all yelling at full volume to people in another room Making the door between them bigger isn't going to help much, because they're all still shouting and yelling and jostling and getting in each others way. Much better is to *organise* the communication, centralise parts of it that are repeated ("You want to know the time? Go ask John on this side, no need to yell all the way other to the person standing by the clock in the other room... he asks them for you, then he can tell everyone on this side"), cut out unnecessary communication entirely, and ensure that when someone *does* need to communicate urgently, they can do so without vying for place, multiple retransmissions, etc.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
