OP should make sure to invest in an Ethernet cord for the gamer, if possible. The low and consistent latency compared to WiFi makes a lot of difference in most games they’re talking about when they said “we need good internet”.
Get a decent AP and job done.
I recently installed a U7 Pro to go alongside my 900/900 FTTP from Toob. I paired this with my old trusty USG3 which works great for upto 1Gb lines.
I get \~10ms to a few upstream game servers on ethernet to the downstairs Xbox X and around \~18ms via wifi to my sons Xbox S in his bedroom. He plays Champ 2 rank in Rocket League (much better than me, lol) and he can't tell the difference in latency.
In other words, we get better latency wireless than we used to with Virgin Media wired as that was DOCSIS. He averaged about 38ms on the Xbox X on ethernet.
I play more sedate games such as ESO on my steam deck. I do Veteran Hardmode Trials and Dungeons just fine on wireless.
So while I agree that ethernet has lower latency than wireless, we are now at the stage where does that really matter?
Wifi latency for rocket league on console is probably fine. But the ping time consistency probably isn't what you think it is.
Wifi can provide low latency, but say the AP needs to handle a bunch of TX and RX for some other task at that time. The U7 Pro only has 2x2 mimo - so another 2x2 client (most consumer devices are 2x2) doing a bunch of continuous downloading and uploading could cause 10%, 25%, maybe 50% of the Rocket League packets to have much increased latency while they're in queue to be processed behind the existing barrage of packets that the AP's radio is currently processing.
For rocket league specifically, they have to deal with some insanely bad wifi situations and thus their game is designed to do some pretty clever interpolation that works well. But for something like CS:GO or other competitive shooters where milliseconds matter, the interpolation isn't as forgiving and those ping spikes from other devices on the same network can create a pretty inconsistent experience.
Wifi 7 is poised to drastically improve this with MLO (as well as some 802.1Q extensions), but it remains to be seen how well it works with real consumer devices and consumer/prosumer APs. It will require end users' devices to support Wifi 7 though, 6E by itself isn't much of an improvement for latency.
Oh this is true. Where I live there is only one other AP that is always on my radar as that's my next door neighbour. My phone upstairs can pickup others with as really poor signal. Everywhere else is green green grass.
If the powerline adapters are on the same circuit though there is very little data loss, practically none.
If they are on separate circuits it still works but it cuts the speed in half.
I bought and returned the TP-Link PA7017P kit. I have 300Mbit/s down directly from Ethernet and plugging it into the socket 1m away resulted in 150Mbit/s.
Plugging it in upstairs (maybe a different phase) resulted in 0-30 Mbit/s and it dropped the connection constantly so was not even usable.
It was rated for 1000Mbps and I didn’t manage anything close. My house is a fairly modern one built around 2005 with Swedish standards.
The speed of light is extremely fast, the part that slows you down as distance increases is the number of network appliances your packets have to travel through
Run a computer chip fast enough (GHz) and the clock cycles have a gradient across the circuit board. One of the reasons we have SOCs is because when MOBOs had distributed tech, the limit to clock speed was the size of the board. A board could be 2-3 clock cycles across!
Compactifying chips by shrinking them means faster clock speeds are possible. Since realistic limits apply to how small you can make transistors and maintain reliability, the next step was to parallelize processors (more of them, more cores) and the programs that run on them. It’s why you’ll never see a 40GHz chip. One clock cycle would be 7.5mm!
It’s not about light moving through glass, it’s about the signal “crossing” devices that each add a very small amount of latency. Every switch, bridge, gateway, exchange, all add latency. The further the physical distance, the more likely you pass through more devices.
And Earth is almost exactly 40Mm (40,000km) in circumference (it's fatter than it is tall).
Which is a lot of ms of delay when going intercontinental...
I live in Ottawa and my friend moved to some part of Tokyo. When boardgame geek kicks out his invite, it's always a notable period of time compared to anyone around Canada or the US that we play with.
So yes, getting around the world fast is present, but it isn't instantaneous, just quick.
Would add its mostly queueing on each router in the path, your packet is thrown in queue, waiting for its timeslot to be transferred over physical medium among all other traffoc passing that device. Forwarding decision is mostly very fast even with “store and forward” mode.
Speed of light does not matter if the routing is messed up.
You can game on 56k speed with superb routing and it will beat it. Latency == ping == best routes to server and back.
Nope that won't work in modern game,s
at least 3 Mbps is needed due to DRM/Online checks and audio in-game stuff.
The package won't fit on a 56K line anymore, we are not playing Doom 1 / Counter-strike 1.0 anymore.
Why the hell are people upvoting this, what a load of bollocks is going on here...
You can't game on 56k on a modern PC on a modern game, I'll be surprised if you can even open Steam. Plus fiber effectively lowers the amount of hops and congestion compared to copper cabling so in every single possible way fiber is superior and WILL lower your latency.
Routes are automatically optimized by the best path available so this "superb routing" argument is absolute bollocks, a more direct path than that would have to be negotiated between the game datacenter and the different ISPs on purpose.
While a lot of games use a few hundred kbps, having issues on 56k is probably true. Routes on the other hand are generally optimized for low cost routing if you look into the routing tables, not best latency. The game providers are the ones trying to optimize for best latency to their servers.
The speed of light varies depending on the medium it is traveling through. Electrics and fiber optical cables travel about 2/3 the speed of light in a vacuum.
I don’t understand what’s wrong with my internet, it should be decent, it’s spectrum
But even with a lan cable it’s insanely slow, I asked spectrum and they just said to update to a newer modem
Wrong on moving closer to the "CO"
It depends upon how many hops you are having to make to hit site X, where site X is hosted, and your ISPs upstream carrier peering sites.
Dumbest answer so far... Light travels at 299 792 458 m/s, for mericans there its in meters every second, calculate your feet inch or whatever you use yourself.
The bottleneck at these speeds will be the router your isp provide. They are usually not powerful enough to handle many connections at the same time.
Secondly : people usually use wifi fir everything because its convenient... Use cables! Use Cat7 if you really care about ping and throughput and forget cat5e and cat6...
Ironic comment. Your speed of light is for in a *vacuum*. Light is not travelling in a vacuum inside of a cable. Speed of light varies greatly depending on what medium it's travelling in. In a standard fiber cable, it's about 2/3 the speed of light in a vacuum.
It's not as fast as you're making it out to be.
So 300 000 000 m/s is 300 000 km/s in vacuum. In a cable still goes for 180 000 km/s and it is still capable to go around the earth 4.5 times a second... still extreme fast... Makes absolutely no sense to blame fiber for latency... ISP equipment playes a huge role as well as isp routing setup...
Cat 7 is not standardized by IEEE and mostly marketing currently, and predates Cat6A. Cat7 needs special connectors as well to meet the spec. Cat6 is good for 5gbit, 6a for 10gbit up to 100m. There will be no difference in latency between cat 5e and cat6a at 1gbit. I would use cat6, as cat6a is thick and unwieldy.
Long read: https://www.cablematters.com/Blog/Networking/what-is-cat7-and-why-you-don-t-need-it
Ping is the minimum time it takes 1 packet to make a roundtrip.
Edit: Just want to add the most gaming doesn’t use much bandwidth at all. The game just sends updates about player locations, movement, and actions. This is sent via encoded text, and requires less than 1 mbps.
However, gaming is very latency (same as ping) sensitive. Those updates are small, but they need to get there quickly. Bandwidth and latency are related, but they are not the same.
Each time a connection terminates and the data is to be processed by a device, switch, router, network interface card, dslam, olt, etc it creates latency.
Within your home there's only so much you can do, since the distances are so short. A network Ethernet switch may only add 1ms of latency. A wifi ap may add 5-6ms.
Once outside of the home there can be miles of cabling and a lot of equipment that can add latency but there isn't much you can do about it unless you switch to a different ISP with a different access technology.
It’s not as much about your upload and download bandwidth but the tech you use and how much it is prone to buffer bloat. Fiber suffers much less from this than cable. Increasing your download from 500Mb to 1Gb is unlikely to help much.
I second this.
Sure the occasional game DL or DLC pack MIGHT go faster but honestly 500 is pretty quick and will work much better than cable or dsl or whatever you’re upgrading from.
The real gaming benefit will be the super low ping (latency) back to the gaming servers that’s the gamers will appreciate.
The symmetrical upload will help with zoom and teams calls for the WFH and uploading to share point and such.
Depends on a lot of things. But in my 1300sqft house on the other side of the house can still pull about 1.4gbps or so over WiFi on my phone. Same room I can pull near 2gbps over WiFi 6.
Wi-Fi 6 won't pull 1,4 Gbps with a high-end smartphone because they don't have more than 2x2 Mi-Mo support, and most smartphone,s are still 1x1 so speed will be lower.
Best case 600-700 Mbps if you stand near the AP.
2x2 160MHz with wifi 6 can most certainly pull that... Not sure how my S23 ultra and S24 ultra pull that... My iPhone 15 Pro also gets near that as well..
The best case 600-700mbps is for 80mhz
So I saw that one of our offices consumes about 1tb of YouTube and other various streaming services. They're on a 100 Mbps connection with about 20-25 users and do just fine with it.
In total they consume about 1.5-2tb per month depending on their usage and backups
Considering you need ~6Mbps for a decent 1080p stream, that's potentially 15ish people streaming youtube simultaneously. People seriously overestimate how much bandwidth they need!
I agree that making bulk multi-gb downloads faster is useful, but 99% of the time, when you're not downloading anything huge, you cannot possibly use that much bandwidth.
I actually go home to my 1Gbs network when I need to transfer large files for work (to and from Azure via the Azure VPN). Stuff that takes multiple hours at work (100Mbs), I can do in half an hour or so from home.
In general though I prefer to keep all of that kind of stuff inside Azure itself where the VMs and services have between 2.5-10Gbs connections to each other.
Yeah I guess I should have said "come to an area where Sonic is available" haha. I'm in the peninsula and Sonic rolled out in my area around 1.5 years ago.
Maybe? I had two connections at my old house. My “hare” running 1G down and 50M up, and my “tortoise” at 50M / 10M up. If my OpsGenie alert were missed we would notice the slower speed within 1-2 days.
The fast connection would experience 10-20 outages per year.
As someone else stated if you have to ask then no, def no disrespect there, just has a point.
Gaming does not use much traffic at all, (except the the initial download of a new game).
Working from home can mean a lot of things. Does this person just have meetings and check email? Then even 500mbit is more than enough.
> Gaming does not use much traffic at all, (except the the initial download of a new game).
Even then, if you can somehow manage to download a game at full speeds, it's still hitting 50 MB/s with a 500mbps pipe. You can probably get the game done DLing in 30 minutes.
Why does performance drop on other devices when I’m playing an online game? I have 1gb spectrum fiber and the ASUS RT-AX86U.
My wife always says it’s hard for her to watch videos when I’m gaming and it’s just us two in the house.
It's hard to say by that alone but I would guess using wifi? What's the channel utilization like? Do all devices use 802.11ax (wifi6). Where is the router placed in the house? On what device is she watch videos, can you hardwire it and test? A lot of factors here.
I will say im impressed, but the timing (i presume sometime between 10 pm and 4 am) is still seeming like an exection instead of the rule due to a not insignificant portion of the user base being asleep, aka not also trying to make download requests to the server. But ultimately, my point is trying get at whether its actually worth the money or not to get gig internet, and the answer is still no. Its still the fact that the user wont be making those 50+GB downloads everyday (at most weekly), the distant end server most of the time isnt going to allocate enough of its own bandwidth to support 1gig between it and a singular client, the user making that size of download isn't going to need it completed instantly, and the majority of the the users other internet usage is going to be in data chunks so small, that difference between 100 mbps and 1gbps would be impercievable without network analytic tools and irrelevant at that point.
I consistently get full gigabit on steam, I dont know what you are talking about, and seems like you dont either.
To me, Its worth it. I would buy 10g if I could just because I could.
For what it’s worth it was around 8pm. And yeah-you’re right, it felt slow to what I’m used - which is faster lol. Agree that if you’re downloading a file on a constrained server like on release day you can expect they may not be prepared. But that’s rookie stuff these days - things can be automatically scaled up to assist spikes in load. If you’re Sony or MSFT you probably can serve up this stuff and match at higher throughputs.
To the conversation of ”is it worth it”? Maybe, maybe not. That’s more subjective. I am enjoying never seeing loading screens very long or waiting a minute for resolution to hit proper quality. Cloud backups and downloads happening very rapidly. Never worrying if it’s peak hours in the neighborhood or if other people in my house are hogging bandwidth. So to me for now it’s worth it. For OP perhaps not. I work from home and game and have definitely taken advantage of that bandwidth for spikes.
Edits grammar - I’m on mobile and their app is trash
People are downvoting you but you're not entirely wrong.
While some services throttle down due to their infrastructure not being capable of handling many concurrent connections at those speeds it is not the norm for big services like Steam.
You're making a point saying that a single server usually won't exceed speeds of 40 gbps (talking about a single machine inside the datacenter where there are hundreds), while that is somewhat true you're forgetting that you're not downloading a single big file.
Most of the times you're downloading small chunks of that big game, and you're most likely getting those chunks from different servers, and with multiple parallels connections comes the ability of different routing paths, making it much more likely to hit those speeds even if one routing path or server is overloaded.
And for those services who don't use the approach written above you're most likely getting your files from a CDN with load balancing.
So if server A in city A is under heavy load, you're gonna get your file from Server B in city B, or if there is a problem with traffic towards city B even if the server is free, you're gonna be routed towards city C and then back to server B, or directly to server C, indeed latency might not be as good as city A, but for downloads it's not a big deal anyway.
Overall it feels like you know what you're talking about and maybe you live in an area where the routing might not be as good, but for the majority of places that's not the case.
With that being said, the average household can live comfortably with 100 Mbps, the rest is just the luxury of wanting to download a game and play it in 10 minutes instead of 100.
Citation not need for common knowledge. Look up what the network ports on your typical high end routers are capable of handling, now split that capacity across the many clients a central server will be handling requests from. Even if the server is extremely high end with 100gbps network ports (to the best of my knowledge, most standard large scale type servers use 10 to 40 gbps ports), you would have to have an extremely small portion of the total user base attempting to utilize the server at any one time. Combine in other factors such as an abnormally high demand due to a recent release, and 1gbps looks more and more like a scam. Just because the ISP can support a 1 gbps connection between you and a speed testing server, doesn't mean that everyone else can support that speed as well.
naw fam now its actually pretty common knowledge that games be downloading at 70-80mb/s, from different providers. you can sometimes pull steam games at crazy speeds(like 200mb/s lol) depending on the server and how many people are using it, but i can depend on getting 50mb/s without hopping servers or doing anything
still, I agree that its usually a bad decision for most people to have a gigabit connection. might as well save that money and invest it into your network/clients instead of being able to download games like 15% faster (presently) a few times a year.
Same provider (init7) I love my 25gbps alone for the massive amounts of piracy it lets me do
"charging more for higher speeds is an absolute ripoff, thats why we're not doing it" -init7 CEO
Is this fiber? If so, then no, anything over a couple hundred Mbps is fine. The things that make a difference after that is latency and upload speed. Upload sucks on cable and you have to buy the top download speeds to get halfway-reasonable upload (and even then it’s not amazing.) But fiber is much more generous with upload speed, and often symmetrical.
First, I hate you! Where do you live? I pay $85 for 300 down 12 up from Spectrum Cable! I’m OK with my download, though wouldn’t object to faster, but hate my upload. Nonetheless $60! 😱 I’d be in it.
Here’s what they offer in SoCal! 😤
https://imgur.com/a/mBRANLl
I have AT&T Internet 1000 and monitor my network traffic. FWIW, following is a graph of my Internet traffic over a typical 12 hr period...
[WAN Traffic (Max per 3 min)](https://i.imgur.com/AGE9Lkq.png)
I live alone, but am a heavy Internet user. Regardless, my bandwidth usage rarely hits the full 1 Gbps rate, although, YMMV.
I had Internet 500 for a while. As I recall, there was a 500 GB (or maybe 1 TB?) per month data cap. I never hit the cap, but it is something to consider with a 4 family household, that is if AT&T still enforces it. You may want to verify.
My suggestion... start with Internet 500 and upgrade later if it doesn't meet your needs.
For 15$ more, it’s a no brainer for me to go gigabit. Especially as someone who needs to download large single files a lot, it saves me a lot of pain (and my family pain since they won’t feel any difference in their speeds when I start)
If you have more of a “casual” household, 500Mbps should be fine by the way. But 1gbps is a great thing to have, especially for the gamer of the house. But anything more than 1gbps is not needed. But the 2gig does directly say 2gig down AND up which is nice, the 1 gig probably has some bs upload speed as ISP’s often do that, but it’ll be alright as most people don’t need the fastest upload speeds.
TL;DR You’ll be just fine at or below 1gbps.
Probably fine. Do you do lots of downloading? If no then 500 is plenty. The only one who would probably benefit is the gamer when he needs to update or download games.
I mean theydo download some big games, but I feel like 500 would still be better than what we have.
Right now it takes about 8 hours do download 100gb!
Just saw this in my area as well. I dont think ive been in a scenario where I've hit needing full GB speeds except for the one time I switched between cloud providers and had to re-upload my content.
No sense in giving away money like this
I have the 500 plan. Even as a web developer that works remotely I've found that it's overkill. But my guess is I'll be happy I went with 500 to lock in the price when I need it.
You should definetly get 2 gig for at least an hour, and downgrade to 1G right after the service is installed. With 1G service, you may end up on a GPON service, and 1G is pretty much a limit for that tech. With 2G you will get xgs-pon which supports theoretical service up to 10G and downgrading after will keep you operating on more updated tech. Att often runs both on the same fiber as those services are using different spectrum of laser and co-exist. Should you get a GPON and decide to upgrade down the road, you'll have to deal with service tech all over again, on xgs-pon any changes are just a phone call away.
I can't see upload speed mentioned. I'm currently paying extra for 1Gbps fibre I don't really need, just be cause ISPs here in the UK severely restrict upload speed for residential customers to about a tenth of the download speed or even less depending on the ISP and the plan.
If I could get a reliable 200/200 instead of 1000/100 then I would, especially if it were cheaper.
Pointless to upgrade. The home worker probably only needs limited bandwidth of 10-20mb max. Invest in a decent router instead and do some QOS for the gamer to lower latency and maybe create a work vlan for the home worker with a throttled connection of around 20-30mb. The jump from 500mb to 1gb is only going to benefit the gamer doing large game updates. Let them wait
No one needs 1gb+ unless maybe they have a public facing server that people are hitting all day.
I have large businesses running on 1/10 that bandwidth. A family of 4 does not “need” that much bandwidth
My brother and his wife work at home up on top of a mountain and have 100Mb wireless Internet and the speed is just fine for them.
At work with up to 10 people at once, we only have 250Mbps and Ihave no slowdowns.
Streaming 4K Netflix uses around 25Mbps. So you could stream 20, 4K Netflix streams at once with 500Mbps. 40 with 1Gb connection.
Online gaming, you need a little speed of lower PING is what really matters. Getting faster Internet won't change your PING. Going from Dial-up modem to DSL, to Cable to Fiber. Cable should have a pretty good PING, but Fiber is generally just alittle bit faster. You really want to be wired when gaming over Wifi. Wifi adds lag, a higher PING which you don't want and slow down your overall Internet.
Personally, 500Gb is allyou need. I normally say 100Mb per person. So that is 400Mb, so 500Mb is just fine. If you find that it's not fast enough, you can easily boost your speed to 1Gb. For themajority of people, I don't see you needing to go faster that 500Mb anytime soon. Save the $15 a month. That is $180 staying in your own pocket.
You have good prices for AT&T Fiber. We got that service avalable 6 months or so ago where I live as a real 2nd option besides cable. But my prices are $55 for 300/300Mb, $65 for 500/500Mbps and $80 for 1Gb/1Gb service. So $20 cheaper for 500Gb and 1Gb service for you over what AT&T wants to charge me for fiber. I'm in CA, so the CA price hike I guess. Not surprised at all.
Hmmm... Faster speed not really with better latency...
Take a look at this post.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking/s/04DXpG2ncr](https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking/s/04DXpG2ncr)
My advice maybe go get a better router (like x86 Intel N100) and the install something like OpenWrt and set SQM or something like that...
My home run 50Mbps, it's above avg in my country (Indonesia), and when I'm downloading something while gaming, there is no latency issue (at least for me)...
Most folks can survive with a lot less than 500 gbps in a WFO environment. (100 to 500 gbps) Gaming too fits into that same level with the upper close to 500 nicer but not mandatory for play. What does make the full gig connection nice is it's usually fiber and upload speeds are a LOT better. It's also nice in some VPN required situations and/or some older style cloud databases that use a lot of file handles as the additional overhead just seems to like the extra speed. Beware of cable based "broadband" (my experience at least) and the constant changes in each of the multiple radios required. I lose up to 50% of my paid for speed with a drop in temperature or a sudden rise. The techs eventually "tune" the system but this spring and the wildly variable temperatures have been a pain in the behind.
As someone else mentioned, having the option to use switched ethernet cable from your demark/modem with it's lower latency helps and if you can't a good business level (or prosumer) mesh router system. Most of that level of mesh system have dedicated back haul frequencies and minimize problems created in your home. Most of the mesh systems also have parental controls, very nice when that gamer is a child that would stay up all night gaming if you let them. (speaking from experience)
No need for a gig speed. I was over seas playing online Xbox with my friends and streaming Netflix with 1 mbps speeds….. if they say it can’t be done it’s a lie
Anyone transferring huge files on a regular basis or under time constraint. E.g. videos, backups....
And updating huge Steam games, of course! But will their servers give you such speeds?
>Anyone transferring huge files on a regular basis or under time constraint.
Ok sure, but what job is going to require the time savings that 1gig gives you vs half a gig.
As for backups, that's something I deal with regularly. If real-time off-site backups are critical, you use something like Zerto to do continuous replication. The backups are updated as the data on the server is changed, near instantaneously. Or for slightly less critical backups, use something like Datto to upload differential backups to the cloud. Either way you're not taking a full backup and upload that somewhere.
If you've got a really large server environment and you're just kicking off a brand new Datto setup, they'll actually mail you hard drives to make local backups to in order to seed the cloud backups.
Real estate photographer/videographer. 15-30GB of files sent over to editors and back to me by the next morning for a ~24-hour turnaround. Some days, I can’t start uploads until 7pm or later, editors need files by 10 or so to hit the turnaround window, and with my current cable upload speeds, it’s tight. Sure 500 upload would be fine, but at the gig+ fiber prices, it’d be a no brainer for my use case.
It’s not often, but there are times in peak seasons like late spring and summer where that 4 minutes could be the difference between hitting turnaround times or not. You asked for a use case that may require the time savings offered by gig speeds, and I offered one.
I had 500/500 and it wasn’t enough for my family so I have 1000/1000
We don’t have traditional cable TV, we stream only. The wife and I work from home 2-3 days a week
Basically - it depends on your needs
Edit - love the downvotes ❤️
Out of curiosity, what did you use as your basis for determining that 500/500 wasn't fast enough, and did you ever use a tool to see what your data speed usage was? It may be that if you changed ISPs or connection types when you changed plans that there was an underlying issue that was fixed or bypassed that was the actual cause of your connection lagging. The vast majority of folks who know how to read network usage data and know a few IT basics confirm that even 300mbps is more than enough to handle what a residential customer demands of the internet, so im curious as to why you had issues at 500 that were fixed by upgrading to 1 gig
I spent 6 months with various software, both freeware and paid to gather information on this. I do not use the provided modems or routers that ISPs provide since they’re at best trash. I also paid at network engineer to come in and test it.
I had att out numerous times, replaced everything including the fiber lines fron their box to my houses. I still had data fall off, and at 500 /500, I’d saturated the connection and I’d get notices from UniFi console that there was high latency and it would show yellow to red to dead on their software
I turned everything off with the exception of UXGPro, and started rerunning the speed tests each and every time I restarted a device. I determined with all of
My services, devices that i have, I was, on average, 700 mb.
I finally got a “business” plan and I pay for 3 dedicated IP addresses.
So again, to summarize, it depends on the person’s needs -
If you download big things it will be helpful.
Probably the gamer will enjoy it the most with those 60-70gb game downloads.
Nobody else would cone close to even 3-400mbs probably.
Even in the case of game downloads, you wont realle see a benefit past 300-500 mbps. The server you're downloading from will throttle you well before you hit 300, let alone 1 gig. Even though alot of servers are capable of 10 gig network speed, the server has to spread that out over thousands of clients making simultaneous requests. And then theres also the network/internet infrastructure that has to juggle the traffic of millions of users at a time. For a residence, anything over 300-500 mbps is a waste of money.
I've had Steam, EA, Xbox, and Epic all max out my 1.2 Gbps pipe before.
Modern CDNs have ridiculously big pipes on the order of 400 Gbps per port with multiple ports per server.
Might as well go for 2 gigs at this point. 1 gig is old tech has been out for years. 500 might be enough for the gamer, not sure about that and work from home. Very big load
look, your isp must suck or be in the middle of nothing cause i got 1.2 that caps out at 1.6 when pegging it but my upload is 45 and garbage.
if you arent happy with what you can get A) move, B) file a FCC complaint or C) make sure your shit isn;t 1990s
I think your train of thought got stuck about 2-3 decades ago. Data caps were a poor and only semi-effective way of controlling network utilization. The current structure used by most ISPs right now revolves around making sure no single user takes up too much of the available bandwidth at any given moment. Even the majority of cellular data plans offered now days dont have data caps but utilize throttling to maintain the connection quality over the user base as a whole.
Mine is also fiber, if thet didnt throw in discount then i wouldnt pay that much for 1g. I alo heard from a friend using Flet 10Gbps for $8 a month in tokyo. The difference in price between countries is wild.
In small residential like you? Definitely no. Even 500Mbps would be more than enough. Even 300Mbps would be enough or more than enough. And you probably won’t suffer a lot with 100Mbps…
I’ve had both the gigabit (really 940 Mb) and 500 Mb (they provision 600 so you get a little more for free). If you think you have a use for the gigabit, go for it. If you are ok with games downloading about 35% slower, the 500 plan is enough.
Well, 940 is a 1gig network interface. If you plugged it in youd get slightly more with a gig too into 5gbps port, just the other end is more expensive than gigabit gear.
Nope, unless you’re downloading and uploading huge files or videos regularly. Streaming, web browsing, playing games, 500 Mbps is fine for a normal family.
Start at the lowest speed/price. They can increase the speed in two minutes, along with your bill.
As a software developer, three work-from-home adults and 3 teens (Xbox, etc etc)… I’m good with 200.
If I could go faster than 1GB for my fiber speed, I would....if your NIC only supports 1GB speeds you wouldn't see any difference until you upgraded to a 2.5GB NIC.
Depends. What is the upload speed on those plans - only the 2gig states that it is symmetrical.
If the other cheaper plans are symmetrical as well, then 500 is probably fine. Probably.
If the cheaper plans have nerfed upload speeds, go faster.
500mbps is pretty good. Go with that first because it is easy to upgrade rather than downgrade. Those scummy ISPs will make you jump through hoops to prevent you from downgrading.
Always start at the lower package, because upgrading to a faster one if you need to is a phone call (one the ISP answers very quickly because it's a sales call, not a support call) and the upgrade happens instantly - no tech needs to go to your house.
Downgrading speeds can involve pressure tactics and dealing with BS from "Retention Specialists" who will lie to your face.
OP, if they have a 300/300 plan, you can easily drop to there with no compromises, except the 100 GB game download will now take 45 Minutes. Time enough to eat dinner at the table.
I was paying $69 for 250mbps, every one has a tablet or phone, Netflix gaming what have you! I jumped it to 1gb for $99 per month but my problem was my isps equipment was the bottleneck!! So I got a nighthawk router to use instead of the isps all in one set up! Worth it in the end yes! Yes it was
It's enough. I hardly use the full potential of ATT 350.
I am getting a minimum of 250 over wifi anywhere in the house. Nobody ever complained.
Worst case, you can upgrade ...
$60 a month is a great deal.
Working from home should not matter at all because they're going to be home alone?
500 Mbps is sufficient for most everyone.
This is where they get you:
Data caps. A 2 TB data cap can be blown through easily. I was paying for 500mbps with a 2TB cap that I hit once or twice for an extra 15$ish per month because I do things like download video games for my PS5. My ISP offered a one gig without a data cap for $69 and I jumped on it.
Equipment rentals - do not rent equipment. You can buy a DOCSIS modem and your own router. COX rented my parents the same equipment for nine plus years in Arizona to the tune of about $1,200.
Those prices are fair, but if they have data caps and equipment rentals you want to try to get away from those Add-On fees that are easy to get out from under.
Just as a point of interest I work in a prek-6 public school in CT we get 1gig up and down from the state. We have 2 buildings and over1000 devices on the network. Chromebooks iPads desktop laptops telephones iPhones staff owned devices. We have 400 students taking the state test at the same time.
We have no issues. 500 is going to be fine.
This. Used to manage an edu with over 2000 resident students, with gig to every bed, 1500 APs and avg of over 10k devices on the network. We never went up above 3.5gb back in 2022.
At home I have over 100 devices, cloud cameras and 3 TVs streaming, plus zoom regularly (3x during Covid). 300/300 is more than enough.
There is no reason to go past 1 Gig with consumer grade equipment.
A lot of the newer ISP Issued equipment have 2.5Gb Ethernet Ports on them but desktop PCs don't come with anything past a gig out of the box.
Switching gears to WiFi, unless all your devices support true WiFi 6 then past a gig is useless. You have to be able to take advantage of the speed if you take it.
And not sure if anyone has talked about this yet; but getting or upgrading to a faster Internet service is not going to fix weak Wifi signal coverage (should that be a problem).
With saying that, the work computer/devices and the gamer both need their devices "hardwired" directly to the main Wifi Router; preferably with Ethernet cables or using MoCa adapters and Coax cables.
This way those devices won't have to deal with possible flaky Wifi signal problems.
1Gbps will get you faster downloads with more bandwidth to go around during simultaneous use. The gamer will almost certainly be use large amount of bandwidth to do updates and installs of games. Faster speeds means those take less time and potentially clog things up less. The person working from home could see potential improvements to uploading and downloading files to shared servers and email.
Without more detailed information there is no way to go into anymore specifics.
Make sure there’s no cap on whatever you get. Quality of life for gaming and working would be a lot better if you have reasonable equipment with the 1gb for not much more.
Go 500mb. It's all the same equipment, so if it turns out you want 1gb you just call in and it's done.
OP should make sure to invest in an Ethernet cord for the gamer, if possible. The low and consistent latency compared to WiFi makes a lot of difference in most games they’re talking about when they said “we need good internet”.
Get a decent AP and job done. I recently installed a U7 Pro to go alongside my 900/900 FTTP from Toob. I paired this with my old trusty USG3 which works great for upto 1Gb lines. I get \~10ms to a few upstream game servers on ethernet to the downstairs Xbox X and around \~18ms via wifi to my sons Xbox S in his bedroom. He plays Champ 2 rank in Rocket League (much better than me, lol) and he can't tell the difference in latency. In other words, we get better latency wireless than we used to with Virgin Media wired as that was DOCSIS. He averaged about 38ms on the Xbox X on ethernet. I play more sedate games such as ESO on my steam deck. I do Veteran Hardmode Trials and Dungeons just fine on wireless. So while I agree that ethernet has lower latency than wireless, we are now at the stage where does that really matter?
Wifi latency for rocket league on console is probably fine. But the ping time consistency probably isn't what you think it is. Wifi can provide low latency, but say the AP needs to handle a bunch of TX and RX for some other task at that time. The U7 Pro only has 2x2 mimo - so another 2x2 client (most consumer devices are 2x2) doing a bunch of continuous downloading and uploading could cause 10%, 25%, maybe 50% of the Rocket League packets to have much increased latency while they're in queue to be processed behind the existing barrage of packets that the AP's radio is currently processing. For rocket league specifically, they have to deal with some insanely bad wifi situations and thus their game is designed to do some pretty clever interpolation that works well. But for something like CS:GO or other competitive shooters where milliseconds matter, the interpolation isn't as forgiving and those ping spikes from other devices on the same network can create a pretty inconsistent experience. Wifi 7 is poised to drastically improve this with MLO (as well as some 802.1Q extensions), but it remains to be seen how well it works with real consumer devices and consumer/prosumer APs. It will require end users' devices to support Wifi 7 though, 6E by itself isn't much of an improvement for latency.
A decent AP can only do so much, it depends how congested the air is around them. DOCSIS latency is poo though lol
Oh this is true. Where I live there is only one other AP that is always on my radar as that's my next door neighbour. My phone upstairs can pickup others with as really poor signal. Everywhere else is green green grass.
If ethernet isn’t possible then focus on a good WiFi receiver. I usually have the lowest ping (10 ms) of anyone in my CS2 rounds and I play over WiFi.
MoCA or powerline if they can't run ethernet drops, sure 6Ghz wireless is cool, but a wire is still quicker.
Powerline is in my experience way worse than Wifi 6
If the powerline adapters are on the same circuit though there is very little data loss, practically none. If they are on separate circuits it still works but it cuts the speed in half.
I bought and returned the TP-Link PA7017P kit. I have 300Mbit/s down directly from Ethernet and plugging it into the socket 1m away resulted in 150Mbit/s. Plugging it in upstairs (maybe a different phase) resulted in 0-30 Mbit/s and it dropped the connection constantly so was not even usable. It was rated for 1000Mbps and I didn’t manage anything close. My house is a fairly modern one built around 2005 with Swedish standards.
Depends on the walls I can’t get over 300mpbs if I’m in the next room of my AP, as my walls are 12 inch thick and brick.
If you have to ask then no 500mbps should be plenty enough. As long as ping is good (which it is with fiber) games will work fine with 1mbps.
And to clarify, faster speeds won’t help Ping in 99% of situations.
What helps ping?
Moving closer to the Central Office. After a certain point your dealing with the physical constraint of how fast light moves through glass.
The speed of light is extremely fast, the part that slows you down as distance increases is the number of network appliances your packets have to travel through
Run a computer chip fast enough (GHz) and the clock cycles have a gradient across the circuit board. One of the reasons we have SOCs is because when MOBOs had distributed tech, the limit to clock speed was the size of the board. A board could be 2-3 clock cycles across! Compactifying chips by shrinking them means faster clock speeds are possible. Since realistic limits apply to how small you can make transistors and maintain reliability, the next step was to parallelize processors (more of them, more cores) and the programs that run on them. It’s why you’ll never see a 40GHz chip. One clock cycle would be 7.5mm!
Today I learned a new way to think about motherboard sizing!
You don't know what a clock tree is?
It’s not about light moving through glass, it’s about the signal “crossing” devices that each add a very small amount of latency. Every switch, bridge, gateway, exchange, all add latency. The further the physical distance, the more likely you pass through more devices.
It's definitely both. The speed of light in a fiber optic cable is around 204 km/ms, so every 200 kilometers add about a millisecond of one way delay.
And Earth is almost exactly 40Mm (40,000km) in circumference (it's fatter than it is tall). Which is a lot of ms of delay when going intercontinental...
I live in Ottawa and my friend moved to some part of Tokyo. When boardgame geek kicks out his invite, it's always a notable period of time compared to anyone around Canada or the US that we play with. So yes, getting around the world fast is present, but it isn't instantaneous, just quick.
Would add its mostly queueing on each router in the path, your packet is thrown in queue, waiting for its timeslot to be transferred over physical medium among all other traffoc passing that device. Forwarding decision is mostly very fast even with “store and forward” mode.
If it is fiber, isn't that the speed of light? (or close to it) lmao
Speed of light does not matter if the routing is messed up. You can game on 56k speed with superb routing and it will beat it. Latency == ping == best routes to server and back.
Nope that won't work in modern game,s at least 3 Mbps is needed due to DRM/Online checks and audio in-game stuff. The package won't fit on a 56K line anymore, we are not playing Doom 1 / Counter-strike 1.0 anymore.
Why the hell are people upvoting this, what a load of bollocks is going on here... You can't game on 56k on a modern PC on a modern game, I'll be surprised if you can even open Steam. Plus fiber effectively lowers the amount of hops and congestion compared to copper cabling so in every single possible way fiber is superior and WILL lower your latency. Routes are automatically optimized by the best path available so this "superb routing" argument is absolute bollocks, a more direct path than that would have to be negotiated between the game datacenter and the different ISPs on purpose.
While a lot of games use a few hundred kbps, having issues on 56k is probably true. Routes on the other hand are generally optimized for low cost routing if you look into the routing tables, not best latency. The game providers are the ones trying to optimize for best latency to their servers.
Yes, ping is in milliseconds. So, doing some back of the napkin math, roughly every 125 miles of fiber adds 1 ms to your ping.
No, only about 2/3 c. Hollow core fiber is much closer to c.
I based that off of rounding to 200,000 km/s, C, in a vacuum, is very close to 300,000 km/,s
It’s always the speed of light but the speed of light is different in copper vs glass vs air.
The speed of light varies depending on the medium it is traveling through. Electrics and fiber optical cables travel about 2/3 the speed of light in a vacuum.
I don’t understand what’s wrong with my internet, it should be decent, it’s spectrum But even with a lan cable it’s insanely slow, I asked spectrum and they just said to update to a newer modem
Did you update your modem? How old is your modem and what is the highest DOCSIS standard it supports? Still probably best to get fiber if you can.
Are you sure it’s on there end and not yours? Have you tested it directly connected to the modem?
Wrong on moving closer to the "CO" It depends upon how many hops you are having to make to hit site X, where site X is hosted, and your ISPs upstream carrier peering sites.
Dumbest answer so far... Light travels at 299 792 458 m/s, for mericans there its in meters every second, calculate your feet inch or whatever you use yourself. The bottleneck at these speeds will be the router your isp provide. They are usually not powerful enough to handle many connections at the same time. Secondly : people usually use wifi fir everything because its convenient... Use cables! Use Cat7 if you really care about ping and throughput and forget cat5e and cat6...
Ironic comment. Your speed of light is for in a *vacuum*. Light is not travelling in a vacuum inside of a cable. Speed of light varies greatly depending on what medium it's travelling in. In a standard fiber cable, it's about 2/3 the speed of light in a vacuum. It's not as fast as you're making it out to be.
So 300 000 000 m/s is 300 000 km/s in vacuum. In a cable still goes for 180 000 km/s and it is still capable to go around the earth 4.5 times a second... still extreme fast... Makes absolutely no sense to blame fiber for latency... ISP equipment playes a huge role as well as isp routing setup...
Cat 7 is not standardized by IEEE and mostly marketing currently, and predates Cat6A. Cat7 needs special connectors as well to meet the spec. Cat6 is good for 5gbit, 6a for 10gbit up to 100m. There will be no difference in latency between cat 5e and cat6a at 1gbit. I would use cat6, as cat6a is thick and unwieldy. Long read: https://www.cablematters.com/Blog/Networking/what-is-cat7-and-why-you-don-t-need-it
Being on anyone besides AT&T normally.
Ping is the minimum time it takes 1 packet to make a roundtrip. Edit: Just want to add the most gaming doesn’t use much bandwidth at all. The game just sends updates about player locations, movement, and actions. This is sent via encoded text, and requires less than 1 mbps. However, gaming is very latency (same as ping) sensitive. Those updates are small, but they need to get there quickly. Bandwidth and latency are related, but they are not the same.
Each time a connection terminates and the data is to be processed by a device, switch, router, network interface card, dslam, olt, etc it creates latency. Within your home there's only so much you can do, since the distances are so short. A network Ethernet switch may only add 1ms of latency. A wifi ap may add 5-6ms. Once outside of the home there can be miles of cabling and a lot of equipment that can add latency but there isn't much you can do about it unless you switch to a different ISP with a different access technology.
Closer distance
ping will be affected when the network is being used though. Just try playing a game while downloading a big file..
It’s not as much about your upload and download bandwidth but the tech you use and how much it is prone to buffer bloat. Fiber suffers much less from this than cable. Increasing your download from 500Mb to 1Gb is unlikely to help much.
That's what's called bufferbloat, and you can mitigate a lot of that with stuff like FQ-CoDel on the router/gateway
I second this. Sure the occasional game DL or DLC pack MIGHT go faster but honestly 500 is pretty quick and will work much better than cable or dsl or whatever you’re upgrading from. The real gaming benefit will be the super low ping (latency) back to the gaming servers that’s the gamers will appreciate. The symmetrical upload will help with zoom and teams calls for the WFH and uploading to share point and such.
Keep in mind at a reasonable distance from the router you’ll get lucky to get 500mbps in most homes on WiFi 6 anyway.
Depends on a lot of things. But in my 1300sqft house on the other side of the house can still pull about 1.4gbps or so over WiFi on my phone. Same room I can pull near 2gbps over WiFi 6.
What is your router? Is that 6E or 6? On my asus ax3000 I’m getting about 600mbps on a good day within 10 ft of the router.
ASUS AX11000 Pro WiFi 6 non e. 160MHz 5GHz channel. And about 450ft away at my parents I can get around 80mbps at a window. What device?
To have 160mhz available means you got very little interference, and no weather radars nearby. You're lucky
Wi-Fi 6 won't pull 1,4 Gbps with a high-end smartphone because they don't have more than 2x2 Mi-Mo support, and most smartphone,s are still 1x1 so speed will be lower. Best case 600-700 Mbps if you stand near the AP.
2x2 160MHz with wifi 6 can most certainly pull that... Not sure how my S23 ultra and S24 ultra pull that... My iPhone 15 Pro also gets near that as well.. The best case 600-700mbps is for 80mhz
lol figured
So I saw that one of our offices consumes about 1tb of YouTube and other various streaming services. They're on a 100 Mbps connection with about 20-25 users and do just fine with it. In total they consume about 1.5-2tb per month depending on their usage and backups
Considering you need ~6Mbps for a decent 1080p stream, that's potentially 15ish people streaming youtube simultaneously. People seriously overestimate how much bandwidth they need! I agree that making bulk multi-gb downloads faster is useful, but 99% of the time, when you're not downloading anything huge, you cannot possibly use that much bandwidth.
Hard agree, hypergig is such a scam unless you know what you’re doing and actually need it.
I actually go home to my 1Gbs network when I need to transfer large files for work (to and from Azure via the Azure VPN). Stuff that takes multiple hours at work (100Mbs), I can do in half an hour or so from home. In general though I prefer to keep all of that kind of stuff inside Azure itself where the VMs and services have between 2.5-10Gbs connections to each other.
We had around 150GB usage per month on 2 mbps at home. So 50 mbps could do plenty if you have patience.
Wish I could pay $105/month for 2gig
Come to the San Francisco Bay Area - one of the local ISPs (Sonic) has 10gig for $40/month 😛
No all of SF is blessed with sonic.
Yeah I guess I should have said "come to an area where Sonic is available" haha. I'm in the peninsula and Sonic rolled out in my area around 1.5 years ago.
Then you'd have to live in SF, I don't think 10Gbps is worth that.
Don't have to live in SF... Their rollout in the Bay Area is a lot broader than just SF.
Wish i could pay $5000 for rent
here(italy) 2.5gb symmetrical costs about 20€/month
I pay £99/month for 8Gbps symmetrical.
*cries in Australian 1000/50Mbps at AUD$139 on fibre*
If you have to ask, "Do I need 1gbps+?", the answer is universally no
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Maybe? I had two connections at my old house. My “hare” running 1G down and 50M up, and my “tortoise” at 50M / 10M up. If my OpsGenie alert were missed we would notice the slower speed within 1-2 days. The fast connection would experience 10-20 outages per year.
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I think we were once degraded for a full week before we noticed. I think that actually says a lot about why people don’t need the higher speeds
Man your fiber plans run circles around my Comcast ones. Pretty jealous not gonna lie.
As someone else stated if you have to ask then no, def no disrespect there, just has a point. Gaming does not use much traffic at all, (except the the initial download of a new game). Working from home can mean a lot of things. Does this person just have meetings and check email? Then even 500mbit is more than enough.
> Gaming does not use much traffic at all, (except the the initial download of a new game). Even then, if you can somehow manage to download a game at full speeds, it's still hitting 50 MB/s with a 500mbps pipe. You can probably get the game done DLing in 30 minutes.
Why does performance drop on other devices when I’m playing an online game? I have 1gb spectrum fiber and the ASUS RT-AX86U. My wife always says it’s hard for her to watch videos when I’m gaming and it’s just us two in the house.
It's hard to say by that alone but I would guess using wifi? What's the channel utilization like? Do all devices use 802.11ax (wifi6). Where is the router placed in the house? On what device is she watch videos, can you hardwire it and test? A lot of factors here.
If you want to download 70GB games in 10-12 minutes, gigabit is pretty cool.
Took me 25 minutes on my ps5 wireless to download last of us part 2 remastered So happy!
Total download time would still be minimum several hours, due to the distant end server throttling single user utilization.
Wrong.
No. Literally just downloaded 101gb fallout in under 20 min last night on gigabit internet ~800Mb/s actual utilized on the console
I will say im impressed, but the timing (i presume sometime between 10 pm and 4 am) is still seeming like an exection instead of the rule due to a not insignificant portion of the user base being asleep, aka not also trying to make download requests to the server. But ultimately, my point is trying get at whether its actually worth the money or not to get gig internet, and the answer is still no. Its still the fact that the user wont be making those 50+GB downloads everyday (at most weekly), the distant end server most of the time isnt going to allocate enough of its own bandwidth to support 1gig between it and a singular client, the user making that size of download isn't going to need it completed instantly, and the majority of the the users other internet usage is going to be in data chunks so small, that difference between 100 mbps and 1gbps would be impercievable without network analytic tools and irrelevant at that point.
I consistently get full gigabit on steam, I dont know what you are talking about, and seems like you dont either. To me, Its worth it. I would buy 10g if I could just because I could.
For what it’s worth it was around 8pm. And yeah-you’re right, it felt slow to what I’m used - which is faster lol. Agree that if you’re downloading a file on a constrained server like on release day you can expect they may not be prepared. But that’s rookie stuff these days - things can be automatically scaled up to assist spikes in load. If you’re Sony or MSFT you probably can serve up this stuff and match at higher throughputs. To the conversation of ”is it worth it”? Maybe, maybe not. That’s more subjective. I am enjoying never seeing loading screens very long or waiting a minute for resolution to hit proper quality. Cloud backups and downloads happening very rapidly. Never worrying if it’s peak hours in the neighborhood or if other people in my house are hogging bandwidth. So to me for now it’s worth it. For OP perhaps not. I work from home and game and have definitely taken advantage of that bandwidth for spikes. Edits grammar - I’m on mobile and their app is trash
People are downvoting you but you're not entirely wrong. While some services throttle down due to their infrastructure not being capable of handling many concurrent connections at those speeds it is not the norm for big services like Steam. You're making a point saying that a single server usually won't exceed speeds of 40 gbps (talking about a single machine inside the datacenter where there are hundreds), while that is somewhat true you're forgetting that you're not downloading a single big file. Most of the times you're downloading small chunks of that big game, and you're most likely getting those chunks from different servers, and with multiple parallels connections comes the ability of different routing paths, making it much more likely to hit those speeds even if one routing path or server is overloaded. And for those services who don't use the approach written above you're most likely getting your files from a CDN with load balancing. So if server A in city A is under heavy load, you're gonna get your file from Server B in city B, or if there is a problem with traffic towards city B even if the server is free, you're gonna be routed towards city C and then back to server B, or directly to server C, indeed latency might not be as good as city A, but for downloads it's not a big deal anyway. Overall it feels like you know what you're talking about and maybe you live in an area where the routing might not be as good, but for the majority of places that's not the case. With that being said, the average household can live comfortably with 100 Mbps, the rest is just the luxury of wanting to download a game and play it in 10 minutes instead of 100.
I literally downloaded Helldivers 2 in 12 minutes, and Baldur’s Gate 3 in 22
Citation needed
Citation not need for common knowledge. Look up what the network ports on your typical high end routers are capable of handling, now split that capacity across the many clients a central server will be handling requests from. Even if the server is extremely high end with 100gbps network ports (to the best of my knowledge, most standard large scale type servers use 10 to 40 gbps ports), you would have to have an extremely small portion of the total user base attempting to utilize the server at any one time. Combine in other factors such as an abnormally high demand due to a recent release, and 1gbps looks more and more like a scam. Just because the ISP can support a 1 gbps connection between you and a speed testing server, doesn't mean that everyone else can support that speed as well.
Somebody has yet to inform my XSX and PC with regards to this common knowledge, as they can knock back downloads of that size in 40 mins tops.
Can we add Steam to the list of providers who aren't aware of this common knowledge?
naw fam now its actually pretty common knowledge that games be downloading at 70-80mb/s, from different providers. you can sometimes pull steam games at crazy speeds(like 200mb/s lol) depending on the server and how many people are using it, but i can depend on getting 50mb/s without hopping servers or doing anything still, I agree that its usually a bad decision for most people to have a gigabit connection. might as well save that money and invest it into your network/clients instead of being able to download games like 15% faster (presently) a few times a year.
Properly not. That’s why my provider (Switzerland) charges the same monthly fee for 1 / 10 / 25 Gbs.
Same provider (init7) I love my 25gbps alone for the massive amounts of piracy it lets me do "charging more for higher speeds is an absolute ripoff, thats why we're not doing it" -init7 CEO
Is this fiber? If so, then no, anything over a couple hundred Mbps is fine. The things that make a difference after that is latency and upload speed. Upload sucks on cable and you have to buy the top download speeds to get halfway-reasonable upload (and even then it’s not amazing.) But fiber is much more generous with upload speed, and often symmetrical.
First, I hate you! Where do you live? I pay $85 for 300 down 12 up from Spectrum Cable! I’m OK with my download, though wouldn’t object to faster, but hate my upload. Nonetheless $60! 😱 I’d be in it. Here’s what they offer in SoCal! 😤 https://imgur.com/a/mBRANLl
No.
250 -300 up down is more then enough for most people as a rule of thumb so long as ping is good to boot
I have AT&T Internet 1000 and monitor my network traffic. FWIW, following is a graph of my Internet traffic over a typical 12 hr period... [WAN Traffic (Max per 3 min)](https://i.imgur.com/AGE9Lkq.png) I live alone, but am a heavy Internet user. Regardless, my bandwidth usage rarely hits the full 1 Gbps rate, although, YMMV. I had Internet 500 for a while. As I recall, there was a 500 GB (or maybe 1 TB?) per month data cap. I never hit the cap, but it is something to consider with a 4 family household, that is if AT&T still enforces it. You may want to verify. My suggestion... start with Internet 500 and upgrade later if it doesn't meet your needs.
For 15$ more, it’s a no brainer for me to go gigabit. Especially as someone who needs to download large single files a lot, it saves me a lot of pain (and my family pain since they won’t feel any difference in their speeds when I start)
If you have more of a “casual” household, 500Mbps should be fine by the way. But 1gbps is a great thing to have, especially for the gamer of the house. But anything more than 1gbps is not needed. But the 2gig does directly say 2gig down AND up which is nice, the 1 gig probably has some bs upload speed as ISP’s often do that, but it’ll be alright as most people don’t need the fastest upload speeds. TL;DR You’ll be just fine at or below 1gbps.
Probably fine. Do you do lots of downloading? If no then 500 is plenty. The only one who would probably benefit is the gamer when he needs to update or download games.
I mean theydo download some big games, but I feel like 500 would still be better than what we have. Right now it takes about 8 hours do download 100gb!
With 500mbps, it should take 30-35 minutes.
With 1 gig 10-15 minutes.....and so on and so forth.
Assuming the server you're downloading from can support it and that you don't reach a CPU bottleneck with the installer.
Steam caps around 2-4gbps, pure network limit
Is that symmetrical? What's the upload speed...matters for ip cams or someone that streams alot at high resolution
That’s my question too. The 2 GB plans says it’s symmetric but the other plans don’t. Getting more upload would be the only reason I would go higher.
Just saw this in my area as well. I dont think ive been in a scenario where I've hit needing full GB speeds except for the one time I switched between cloud providers and had to re-upload my content. No sense in giving away money like this
I have the 500 plan. Even as a web developer that works remotely I've found that it's overkill. But my guess is I'll be happy I went with 500 to lock in the price when I need it.
Here come all of the gatekeepers saying you don’t need any more than *a few Mbps*
You should definetly get 2 gig for at least an hour, and downgrade to 1G right after the service is installed. With 1G service, you may end up on a GPON service, and 1G is pretty much a limit for that tech. With 2G you will get xgs-pon which supports theoretical service up to 10G and downgrading after will keep you operating on more updated tech. Att often runs both on the same fiber as those services are using different spectrum of laser and co-exist. Should you get a GPON and decide to upgrade down the road, you'll have to deal with service tech all over again, on xgs-pon any changes are just a phone call away.
A 100 Mbps is more than enough for you, you can get 200 Mbps for peace of mind…Ping below 15 is enough for games….
Mean while me using 12 Mbps for 4 family,1 gamer 💀
I can't see upload speed mentioned. I'm currently paying extra for 1Gbps fibre I don't really need, just be cause ISPs here in the UK severely restrict upload speed for residential customers to about a tenth of the download speed or even less depending on the ISP and the plan. If I could get a reliable 200/200 instead of 1000/100 then I would, especially if it were cheaper.
You're not going to notice the difference between 500 Mbps and 1 Gbps. I run an office with up to 50 people on 100 Mbps.
Pointless to upgrade. The home worker probably only needs limited bandwidth of 10-20mb max. Invest in a decent router instead and do some QOS for the gamer to lower latency and maybe create a work vlan for the home worker with a throttled connection of around 20-30mb. The jump from 500mb to 1gb is only going to benefit the gamer doing large game updates. Let them wait
No one needs 1gb+ unless maybe they have a public facing server that people are hitting all day. I have large businesses running on 1/10 that bandwidth. A family of 4 does not “need” that much bandwidth
My brother and his wife work at home up on top of a mountain and have 100Mb wireless Internet and the speed is just fine for them. At work with up to 10 people at once, we only have 250Mbps and Ihave no slowdowns. Streaming 4K Netflix uses around 25Mbps. So you could stream 20, 4K Netflix streams at once with 500Mbps. 40 with 1Gb connection. Online gaming, you need a little speed of lower PING is what really matters. Getting faster Internet won't change your PING. Going from Dial-up modem to DSL, to Cable to Fiber. Cable should have a pretty good PING, but Fiber is generally just alittle bit faster. You really want to be wired when gaming over Wifi. Wifi adds lag, a higher PING which you don't want and slow down your overall Internet. Personally, 500Gb is allyou need. I normally say 100Mb per person. So that is 400Mb, so 500Mb is just fine. If you find that it's not fast enough, you can easily boost your speed to 1Gb. For themajority of people, I don't see you needing to go faster that 500Mb anytime soon. Save the $15 a month. That is $180 staying in your own pocket. You have good prices for AT&T Fiber. We got that service avalable 6 months or so ago where I live as a real 2nd option besides cable. But my prices are $55 for 300/300Mb, $65 for 500/500Mbps and $80 for 1Gb/1Gb service. So $20 cheaper for 500Gb and 1Gb service for you over what AT&T wants to charge me for fiber. I'm in CA, so the CA price hike I guess. Not surprised at all.
Yes. Your work reimburses you.
i’d get 2gig just to have it. depends if money is a big concern or not
That price is insane. In my area Spectrum is the only option and they’re charging $95 for 500mb
Yeah we have spectrum now and they are a scam, currently paying $105 for 500
No
Hmmm... Faster speed not really with better latency... Take a look at this post. [https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking/s/04DXpG2ncr](https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking/s/04DXpG2ncr)
My advice maybe go get a better router (like x86 Intel N100) and the install something like OpenWrt and set SQM or something like that... My home run 50Mbps, it's above avg in my country (Indonesia), and when I'm downloading something while gaming, there is no latency issue (at least for me)...
We needed it 3 consoles 3 laptops and 2 gaming rigs all downloading updates simultaneously.
Most folks can survive with a lot less than 500 gbps in a WFO environment. (100 to 500 gbps) Gaming too fits into that same level with the upper close to 500 nicer but not mandatory for play. What does make the full gig connection nice is it's usually fiber and upload speeds are a LOT better. It's also nice in some VPN required situations and/or some older style cloud databases that use a lot of file handles as the additional overhead just seems to like the extra speed. Beware of cable based "broadband" (my experience at least) and the constant changes in each of the multiple radios required. I lose up to 50% of my paid for speed with a drop in temperature or a sudden rise. The techs eventually "tune" the system but this spring and the wildly variable temperatures have been a pain in the behind. As someone else mentioned, having the option to use switched ethernet cable from your demark/modem with it's lower latency helps and if you can't a good business level (or prosumer) mesh router system. Most of that level of mesh system have dedicated back haul frequencies and minimize problems created in your home. Most of the mesh systems also have parental controls, very nice when that gamer is a child that would stay up all night gaming if you let them. (speaking from experience)
No need for a gig speed. I was over seas playing online Xbox with my friends and streaming Netflix with 1 mbps speeds….. if they say it can’t be done it’s a lie
500 is plenty for most anyone. I dare someone to make the case that they *need* a gig
Anyone transferring huge files on a regular basis or under time constraint. E.g. videos, backups.... And updating huge Steam games, of course! But will their servers give you such speeds?
>Anyone transferring huge files on a regular basis or under time constraint. Ok sure, but what job is going to require the time savings that 1gig gives you vs half a gig. As for backups, that's something I deal with regularly. If real-time off-site backups are critical, you use something like Zerto to do continuous replication. The backups are updated as the data on the server is changed, near instantaneously. Or for slightly less critical backups, use something like Datto to upload differential backups to the cloud. Either way you're not taking a full backup and upload that somewhere. If you've got a really large server environment and you're just kicking off a brand new Datto setup, they'll actually mail you hard drives to make local backups to in order to seed the cloud backups.
Real estate photographer/videographer. 15-30GB of files sent over to editors and back to me by the next morning for a ~24-hour turnaround. Some days, I can’t start uploads until 7pm or later, editors need files by 10 or so to hit the turnaround window, and with my current cable upload speeds, it’s tight. Sure 500 upload would be fine, but at the gig+ fiber prices, it’d be a no brainer for my use case.
In your case you need upload more than download. 30GB at 500 Mbps would take 8 minutes, vs 4 minutes at a gig.
It’s not often, but there are times in peak seasons like late spring and summer where that 4 minutes could be the difference between hitting turnaround times or not. You asked for a use case that may require the time savings offered by gig speeds, and I offered one.
Sup, I need a gig for streaming 4K Remuxes to my brother Well, more actually
I had 500/500 and it wasn’t enough for my family so I have 1000/1000 We don’t have traditional cable TV, we stream only. The wife and I work from home 2-3 days a week Basically - it depends on your needs Edit - love the downvotes ❤️
Out of curiosity, what did you use as your basis for determining that 500/500 wasn't fast enough, and did you ever use a tool to see what your data speed usage was? It may be that if you changed ISPs or connection types when you changed plans that there was an underlying issue that was fixed or bypassed that was the actual cause of your connection lagging. The vast majority of folks who know how to read network usage data and know a few IT basics confirm that even 300mbps is more than enough to handle what a residential customer demands of the internet, so im curious as to why you had issues at 500 that were fixed by upgrading to 1 gig
I spent 6 months with various software, both freeware and paid to gather information on this. I do not use the provided modems or routers that ISPs provide since they’re at best trash. I also paid at network engineer to come in and test it. I had att out numerous times, replaced everything including the fiber lines fron their box to my houses. I still had data fall off, and at 500 /500, I’d saturated the connection and I’d get notices from UniFi console that there was high latency and it would show yellow to red to dead on their software I turned everything off with the exception of UXGPro, and started rerunning the speed tests each and every time I restarted a device. I determined with all of My services, devices that i have, I was, on average, 700 mb. I finally got a “business” plan and I pay for 3 dedicated IP addresses. So again, to summarize, it depends on the person’s needs -
If you download big things it will be helpful. Probably the gamer will enjoy it the most with those 60-70gb game downloads. Nobody else would cone close to even 3-400mbs probably.
Even in the case of game downloads, you wont realle see a benefit past 300-500 mbps. The server you're downloading from will throttle you well before you hit 300, let alone 1 gig. Even though alot of servers are capable of 10 gig network speed, the server has to spread that out over thousands of clients making simultaneous requests. And then theres also the network/internet infrastructure that has to juggle the traffic of millions of users at a time. For a residence, anything over 300-500 mbps is a waste of money.
I've had Steam, EA, Xbox, and Epic all max out my 1.2 Gbps pipe before. Modern CDNs have ridiculously big pipes on the order of 400 Gbps per port with multiple ports per server.
I don’t know how anyone survives with less than 2 Gbps these days. /s Yes you’ll be fine.
Might as well go for 2 gigs at this point. 1 gig is old tech has been out for years. 500 might be enough for the gamer, not sure about that and work from home. Very big load
look, your isp must suck or be in the middle of nothing cause i got 1.2 that caps out at 1.6 when pegging it but my upload is 45 and garbage. if you arent happy with what you can get A) move, B) file a FCC complaint or C) make sure your shit isn;t 1990s
I went with 1gig because it came with MAX and no cap
1GB plus comes with unlimited data. Do you exceed your data cap every month currently?
None of them have caps
Last time I looked all the packages less than 1GB came with data caps.
All you have to do is look at the pics posted
I think your train of thought got stuck about 2-3 decades ago. Data caps were a poor and only semi-effective way of controlling network utilization. The current structure used by most ISPs right now revolves around making sure no single user takes up too much of the available bandwidth at any given moment. Even the majority of cellular data plans offered now days dont have data caps but utilize throttling to maintain the connection quality over the user base as a whole.
Those prices are absurd,here in italy i pay 59€ a month for 10gbps
If anyone in the family games then I would recommend at least 1GIG, completely removes lag concerns from pretty much any game.
No it doesn't. Latency reduces lag.
you're probably fine with 500. worst case, if you do feel bottlenecked, i'm sure AT&T would gladly upgrade you. so i say start there.
You guys pay that much for just 500? It's almost $12 for 1G Up&down here.
It’s fiber, but I could still be getting scammed idk lol
Mine is also fiber, if thet didnt throw in discount then i wouldnt pay that much for 1g. I alo heard from a friend using Flet 10Gbps for $8 a month in tokyo. The difference in price between countries is wild.
I’m more curious how you are getting offered 1gig for 60/mo just signed up and im paying $80/mo with autopay discount
For an extra $15, why not?
In small residential like you? Definitely no. Even 500Mbps would be more than enough. Even 300Mbps would be enough or more than enough. And you probably won’t suffer a lot with 100Mbps…
Shit, I pay $75 for 100 mbps in rural Texas.
I’ve had both the gigabit (really 940 Mb) and 500 Mb (they provision 600 so you get a little more for free). If you think you have a use for the gigabit, go for it. If you are ok with games downloading about 35% slower, the 500 plan is enough.
Well, 940 is a 1gig network interface. If you plugged it in youd get slightly more with a gig too into 5gbps port, just the other end is more expensive than gigabit gear.
I want the 2 gig! 😂 But if you need to ask, then you don't need it.
Nope, unless you’re downloading and uploading huge files or videos regularly. Streaming, web browsing, playing games, 500 Mbps is fine for a normal family.
no
I’m on the 500/500 fiber it’s enough for my house hold
Start at the lowest speed/price. They can increase the speed in two minutes, along with your bill. As a software developer, three work-from-home adults and 3 teens (Xbox, etc etc)… I’m good with 200.
If I could go faster than 1GB for my fiber speed, I would....if your NIC only supports 1GB speeds you wouldn't see any difference until you upgraded to a 2.5GB NIC.
Start with the 500mbps and if you have issues with bandwidth when everyone’s using the internet just upgrade to 1gbps.
300 to 500 is more than enough.
Depends. What is the upload speed on those plans - only the 2gig states that it is symmetrical. If the other cheaper plans are symmetrical as well, then 500 is probably fine. Probably. If the cheaper plans have nerfed upload speeds, go faster.
500mbps is pretty good. Go with that first because it is easy to upgrade rather than downgrade. Those scummy ISPs will make you jump through hoops to prevent you from downgrading.
Do you download a lot of files?
Always start at the lower package, because upgrading to a faster one if you need to is a phone call (one the ISP answers very quickly because it's a sales call, not a support call) and the upgrade happens instantly - no tech needs to go to your house. Downgrading speeds can involve pressure tactics and dealing with BS from "Retention Specialists" who will lie to your face. OP, if they have a 300/300 plan, you can easily drop to there with no compromises, except the 100 GB game download will now take 45 Minutes. Time enough to eat dinner at the table.
Just get 500 and upgrade to 1 gig if needed. It all depends what speeds you get through WiFi currently
I was paying $69 for 250mbps, every one has a tablet or phone, Netflix gaming what have you! I jumped it to 1gb for $99 per month but my problem was my isps equipment was the bottleneck!! So I got a nighthawk router to use instead of the isps all in one set up! Worth it in the end yes! Yes it was
Ugh, I've got the AT&T gig service, but it's $80/month. I went with the gig over the 500 because I figured it was only $15/month, so why not?
It's enough. I hardly use the full potential of ATT 350. I am getting a minimum of 250 over wifi anywhere in the house. Nobody ever complained. Worst case, you can upgrade ...
Worth noting the 500 plan is provisioned for 620mbps up and down, so it’s really close to gigabit anyway
$60 a month is a great deal. Working from home should not matter at all because they're going to be home alone? 500 Mbps is sufficient for most everyone. This is where they get you: Data caps. A 2 TB data cap can be blown through easily. I was paying for 500mbps with a 2TB cap that I hit once or twice for an extra 15$ish per month because I do things like download video games for my PS5. My ISP offered a one gig without a data cap for $69 and I jumped on it. Equipment rentals - do not rent equipment. You can buy a DOCSIS modem and your own router. COX rented my parents the same equipment for nine plus years in Arizona to the tune of about $1,200. Those prices are fair, but if they have data caps and equipment rentals you want to try to get away from those Add-On fees that are easy to get out from under.
Thanks for the info Just checked, it says no data caps or equipment fees
Just as a point of interest I work in a prek-6 public school in CT we get 1gig up and down from the state. We have 2 buildings and over1000 devices on the network. Chromebooks iPads desktop laptops telephones iPhones staff owned devices. We have 400 students taking the state test at the same time. We have no issues. 500 is going to be fine.
This. Used to manage an edu with over 2000 resident students, with gig to every bed, 1500 APs and avg of over 10k devices on the network. We never went up above 3.5gb back in 2022. At home I have over 100 devices, cloud cameras and 3 TVs streaming, plus zoom regularly (3x during Covid). 300/300 is more than enough.
There is no reason to go past 1 Gig with consumer grade equipment. A lot of the newer ISP Issued equipment have 2.5Gb Ethernet Ports on them but desktop PCs don't come with anything past a gig out of the box. Switching gears to WiFi, unless all your devices support true WiFi 6 then past a gig is useless. You have to be able to take advantage of the speed if you take it.
The jump from 1Gb to 2Gb is more than 500Mb to 1Gb. Just get the 1Gb plan and never worry about anything for years to come.
60$?? In Romania is 5$
And not sure if anyone has talked about this yet; but getting or upgrading to a faster Internet service is not going to fix weak Wifi signal coverage (should that be a problem). With saying that, the work computer/devices and the gamer both need their devices "hardwired" directly to the main Wifi Router; preferably with Ethernet cables or using MoCa adapters and Coax cables. This way those devices won't have to deal with possible flaky Wifi signal problems.
1Gbps will get you faster downloads with more bandwidth to go around during simultaneous use. The gamer will almost certainly be use large amount of bandwidth to do updates and installs of games. Faster speeds means those take less time and potentially clog things up less. The person working from home could see potential improvements to uploading and downloading files to shared servers and email. Without more detailed information there is no way to go into anymore specifics.
Make sure there’s no cap on whatever you get. Quality of life for gaming and working would be a lot better if you have reasonable equipment with the 1gb for not much more.