Low latency and consistent speed can be just as important (or more important, depending on your use) as maximum speed.
I pay $135/month for a 1.5mbps synchronous connection in the United States. On the face of it that seems ridiculously expensive for what I'm getting. But that includes a /28 block of static IP addresses and the connection is *always* that fast. There are no slow times. There are no problems. (The longest "outage" I've seen in the past 6 months is about 5-10 seconds, and that's been 2 or 3 times.)
Of course I wish (like everybody) that my connection was faster. But I'll take a connection that always works and always delivers low latency and moderate speed over one that goes fast sometimes and slow (or worse, fails) other times.