While others across the industry battle it out over 10-gig claims, Google Fiber is looking to go bigger, plotting the rollout of a symmetrical 20-gig service for select residential and business cus | The service will use Nokia's 25G-PON gear and initially be available later this year as an invite-only product.
Video calls were all over 1950s futurism articles. These things do get anticipated far ahead of time.
4K Blu-ray discs have a maximum bitrate of 128 Mbps. Most streaming services compress more heavily than that; they’re closer to 30 to 50 Mbps. A 1Gbps feed can easily handle several people streaming 4K video on the same connection provided there’s some quality of service guarantees.
If other tech were there, we could likely stream a fully immersive live VR environment to nearly holodeck-level realism on 1Gbps.
IPv6 is the real blocker. As you say, self-hosting is what could really bring bandwidth usage up. I think some kind of distributed system (something like BitTorrent) is more likely than files hosted on one specific server, at least for publicly available files.