I'm not entirely sure the maximum speed is the main problem.
The method of delivery is the main problem in my opinion.
Lets say you have a gigabit capable connection to your house/building, so if there is a choice of speeds to suit your requirements, fantastic!
A gigabit capable connection to every house/building would be the ideal, with people choosing what speed service they require on top of that.
Having to settle with whatever fttc/adsl can manage out of your copper line is not ideal.

Yes FTTC is great when you get good speeds, we get 36/6 at work, which is OK but it's no where near the 80/20 you get when you are close to the cabinet, and whichever way you look at it this is where FTTC fails as it still use copper which is prone to all sorts of problems.

In an ideal world car manufacturers would be forced to upgrade our engines to more efficient ones, than force us to buy a whole new car...

Get three or more drives and put them in a RAID5 if your single drive can't cope.

You can use iperf to speed test gigabit LAN. This does not require a beefy CPU. My AMD Athlon(tm) II Neo N36L processors can cope with gigabit.

Indeed, However it's harder to compare a car we chose to buy compared to a telephone line we have been "given".
The issue is we are at the mercy of what is available to our property, not as much about "choosing" a car.
At a stretch it's like saying, your local road can only support 30mph, therefore you can only drive a car which has a maximum speed of 30mph. (on the basis that the internet (unlimited speed for sake of argument) is every other road connected to your local road (therefore restricting you based on your locality).
However it's particularly annoying when your mate lives on a 70mph local road, buys exactly the same car and he is only restricted to 70mph on the global scheme of things).
I know it's not a very good argument, but when two people pay the same amount for the same "vehicle" they would be disappointed in unequal service.

But is it made of copper and/or aluminium but also powered by fibre and what's the speedtest result?

In reply to a post by Zadeks:

Get three or more drives and put them in a RAID5 if your single drive can't cope.

You can use iperf to speed test gigabit LAN. This does not require a beefy CPU. My AMD Athlon(tm) II Neo N36L processors can cope with gigabit.

I've got a machine with 2 128GB SSDs in RAID 5 - they are really quick, totally pointless but it seemed like a fun thing to do when I was doing my last home build. Alas, no gigabit Internet connection to see what it would do...

In reply to a post by mr_mojo:

BT has made a very wise decision not to go past FTTC right now.

Thereby ensuring that the people who really need improvements to their broadband speed can't get them, whilst delivering a faster service to people who mostly don't want it.