I ask because I feel I need to save some money in the oncoming months. Currently, I pay over $76 for 100MBps/1000GB cap. And I don’t think it’s a bad deal, but they’re going to be hiking it up to $90+ by next October and I feel it is not worth that. But I also need to save money too.
What is the difference between 55MB and 100MB when it comes to speed? The cap for the 55MBps plan is 350GB and I tried asking if that could be altered but the ISP says they can’t. This plan will cost me $30 a month.
All I ever do anymore is just stream YouTube, sometimes Hulu/Netflix/Tubi. Occasionally I’ll download a game or two, multiplayer gaming is non-existent.
Edit: There’s been a lot of good responses replied to this and I appreciate it.
I’m leaning towards on downgrading with the volume of people that suggest that it isn’t that bad, but it boils down to preferences and habitual behaviors when using the internet. With so many games already downloaded and being left to just streaming/Second Life, I think it warrants the change.
I just wish that my ISP would’ve kicked up the cap to 500GB because that’d sweeten the deal much more but this ISP is not well known and these kind of ISPs operate on different worlds than the big names.
Furthermore, people have suggested going 5G Wireless but the problem with that is that my apartment management is stingy as fuck so it’s not an option for me nor does Verizon say that they can offer a plan in my current location. Fiber connections such as Google Fiber, MetroNet .etc aren’t an option.
Century Link seems to only offer $70 for…10MB in my location (Fucking awful)
Mediacom says they can’t even service my area (then how come I see your vans around where I am with other customers?)
I’m at 70 Mbs. That’s enough for 3 people streaming on various devices and one kid gaming.
350 GB for $30 sounds terrible. I’m in the EU but we get unlimited plans for that amount.
You guys get more than 1MB/s?
You guys get less than a gigabit?
To me in Italy, which generally has shitty internet by europe standards, your rates are horrifingly terrible, expensive, and inexplicably capped. I pity your network
To me in Michigan, I also find those rates horrifyingly terrible, expensive, and inexplicably capped.
But here we have a few options for ISPs. In places where they don’t really compete with each other, you can get absurdly terrible plans. And it’s perfectly legal because fuck you, consumer, that’s why.
What will it take for people to burn down all corporate offices?
I dunno, Fight Club?
More like America - Fuck you for living here, bruh. Deal with it.
In my neighborhood AT&T is offering gigabit fiber-to-the-house for $80/month, IIRC. Been meaning to switch to it, actually.
Edit: my point being, as long as they aren’t colluding to not compete with one another, you can get much better rates.
I thought I was overpaying for my 1500Mbps at £75
Thank you EU for your many blessings.
EU ? £ ? Didn’t you guys leave ?
You can take the UK out of the EU but you can’t take the EU out of the UK
lol now comes australia: $109 for 100/40, and that’s a good deal because our conservative government fucked everything and pissed away $40bn
I pay $15 / mo for 600 Mbps symetric in Thailand. But I go off the beaten path with just my cell as a hotspot which is 10 Mbps for $90 annually. I can do almost anything I want with even those speeds—just make sure you are blocking ads (uBlock + DNS) to stop all the sludge from gauming up your pipes.
I’ve been gaming and streaming most of my life with sub-30mbps download and sub 15 upload speeds, didn’t have symmetrical 50+ until a year ago.
As others have said, you have to plan ahead. If you need to download something large, let it be and go do something else while it does its thing. Streaming high quality on two screens or more is doable but you’ll buffer eventually.
You can probably set up some rules on your router to prioritise whatever device you deem most important, however. Although, if its important enough to warrant a rule on your router, it would probably be better to just plug an ethernet cable in anyway.
You’ll be fine on 55mbps. That’s what I was on for the last decade in Denver. Has no issues with bandwidth in my household.
I’m betting $100 on you running back to your ISP’s nearest office to extend your plan within a week.
I’m not an expert but I think you should be fine on the lower one. My understanding is that most plans wildly overemphasize what you need for an activity. Like they’ll say the most expensive one is for gaming but in reality the cheap one would work completely fine for a single person.
I used to have 55mbps and I never had any issues. You won’t be downloading huge games in minutes but just plan ahead and you’ll be fine.
I went from 100 Mb/s to 50 Mb/s about 1.5 years ago, and to be honest it is enough but can be an annoyance. Streaming is no Problem, even two concurrent 4k streams work (tried on youtube, Netflix and Disney+). Downloads just take a while so if you have to download larger files you need to plan ahead a bit. Also, streaming while performing large downloads is tricky. In order to avoid constant buffering you’ll need to either significantly reduce your streams quality or set um some priorisation rules on your network.
A single 1080p Netflix stream will consume about 4Mbps.
If you just stream music and media and browse the net, that’s an easy way to benchmark. If you’re gaming, higher speeds will not increase performance of online gaming - this requires quite little and depends more on latency (satellite/star link vs cable/fiber etc). The higher speeds will only help with more concurrent users or game/media downloads (if you pirate media, for example).
It depends… you say several times “I”. So yeah if it is just you, 55 is likely fine.
If you are the only one, watching something, then yeah likely you’ll be fine
Last summer I switched to Tmo 5G home internet. At my location it beats the 100/20 cable plan I had at half the price. YMMV, my last house only 1/4 mile away it was unusably slow, like 20/1
5G fixed wireless is the way. I could pay Cox $120/mo for a 500Mbps cable line with a data cap, or I could pay Verizon $60/mo for 5G and get 1200Mbps with no BS fake data cap.
5G home internet is cheap because not a lot of people have it yet. Jump on the train now OP before it gets more expensive.
The only catch is that you have to make sure you have good line-of-sight to the tower before you order. That’s the key to getting good speeds. Look out your windows and try to find some 5G antennas. In my neighborhood they’re installed on the light poles.
That said, even if you can only get LTE service, chances are it’ll still be cheaper and faster than the competition in your area. So it still might be worth it to look into it.
I started on a 50Mbps plan which was a massive upgrade from what Comcast offered at the time, so I was pretty pleased with that. At one point I noticed something dragging down my connection, and found signs of people attacking my servers. That was easily dealt with, however what surprised me was the speed of the traffic I was seeing. After blocking the attack I pushed up my torrents and realized I had been upgraded to a 100Mbps connection and didn’t realize it (I really do love my local provider!).
So yeah, for general web browsing you probably won’t notice any difference between those two speeds. If you are downloading specific content then of course the downgrade will take twice as long, and as others mentioned it shouldn’t affect your streaming speeds at all.
55mbps down will be enough when lower cost is most important. it’s about the download speed we have at the office (55mbps), and at home too (faster but network gear is slower than the pipe coming in, so 55-60mbps is what i get on the main pc).
we can have a remote desktop going with multimedia coming through that (for work; low bitrate but latency matters), 2-3 hd streams, a couple screens on web sites, something downloading a huge batch of updates, an online ‘shooter’ game being played, and still not worry about loading up something else to use some more.
for straight downloads from servers and cdn that can handle it, expect 2-4 minutes for a typical linux iso download, and for big downloads about 25 gigabytes per hour max.
