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?)
You guys get more than 1MB/s?
You guys get less than a gigabit?
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.
Speed wise 55Mb/s is fine. Higher speeds are nice for game downloads/etc but that’s plenty. I had to live with 3Mb/s until a couple years ago, and we were able to have multiple people watching Netflix/etc on different devices. Not 4k obviously, but surprisingly good video quality for the amount of data available.
The data cap could be a problem though. You’ll probably be fine if you don’t download many games, but that’s an easy cap to hit these days.
I would expand this to say that it matters how many people in the household. For one person, 55 Mbps is fine for streaming video and 350 GB is fine for downloads, unless you’re d/l multiple AAA games. 350 GB might also cause trouble if you do significant cloud backups.
If you’re in a household of 4 people, that 350 GB is likely to bite, and 55 Mbps is likely to struggle if you’re all watching something different.
Make sure you’re not mixing up MBps and Mbps. Internet speed is almost always measured in megabits (Mbps) not megaBytes (MBps), the former being 1/8 of the equivalent megabytes per second.
55 megaBYTES per second is just fine, that’s a full HD movie download in about 3 minutes. 55 megaBITS would be about 24 minutes for the same thing. Would that matter to you? No idea. But if you’re currently at 100, everything would take about twice as long as before the switch regardless.
In terms of bandwith to stream things you won’t have a problem. Some high quality stuff can get to around 55Mbps (bits per second). But most streaming services send you the lowest quality shit imaginable so you’re probably using less than 20 at any given moment.
That data cap is much more concerning to me, how much streaming do you do? At 10Mbps (typical streaming quality) that’s about 3 straight days of watching video which sounds like a lot. But many AAA games are >100GB in size and that’s 1/3 of your data right there.
I watch maybe 2-10 videos a day. Lengths between 2 minutes to a couple videos clocking an hour. I do not watch anything beyond 1 and a half hours unless it is a movie and that video is interesting enough.
I sometimes have audio streaming for background noise when sleeping but audio streaming is practically chump change so it is no factor.
Game downloading averages 100MB to 4GB at most with bigger games rarely ever being a thing.
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.
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).
Speed should be the same (as in ping), the bandwidth is half of it. If you are alone 50Mb/s should be more than enought for people who don’t need to download huge amounts of data quickly.
So if you don’t build operating systems from source code, don’t need to download huge games on a regular basis, don’t work as a editor with huge video files you share with others, don’t do p2p pirating, and similar things, I don’t think you will see a big difference.
If you’re a big family where everyone starts streaming youtube or twitch/netflix or do alot of voice/IP calls when they come home at the same time, then you will feel the difference.
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.
I’m betting $100 on you running back to your ISP’s nearest office to extend your plan within a week.
May I ask what city and state you live in? These options seem terrible.
I was thinking the opposite. I have 1 option for “high speed” in my town, and it’s $90 for 12Mbps that rarely actually gets to that speed. I just barely switched to starlink and it’s been amazing.
Des Moines Iowa.
Yes I know the options are terrible and I am aware if alternative ISPs but my apartment management only offers just one ISP. It is not Verizon or any other big name, just some not so well known company with a site design from the 90s in every bad way.
May I humbly suggest Verizon 5G home internet. I checked and it’s widely available in Des Moines. Around $45 a month with a discount if you also have Verizon mobile. 300mbps down and like 30 up. No caps. It’s just a white box that uses cell towers, so you are not limited to whatever shitty service your apartment complex has contracted with. I used it for 2 or 3 years in Providence, RI, and it was terrific. Cheap, fast enough for my work needs and streaming on 2 TVs, and I never had any problems.
Tried doing an area search, only got a form for my address to notify me when service is available.
Oh bummer. I used city hall as the address, since that’s all I had to go on.
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Because they are the shitty kind. Here is what I do not get, I have seen CenturyLink and Mediacom vans come in my area. I assume it is to service people’s connections or other things. If my apartment management tells me that VisionSystems is all that they can offer, why do I see vans from other ISPs come here?
And Mediacom isnt too far from us either.
Mediacom and CenturyLink claim to not service my building though so something is not adding up.
This practice is allowed and it sucks. Try wireless.
Note to self. Do not move to Des Moines. I pay $60/mo for symmetrical gig (1000 Mbps) with no cap.
Maybe T-Mobile home Internet is good enough?
Try tmobile’s wireless internet. They usually have an option to try free for 30 days. Depending on where you live it can be a great alternative.
Yeah that’s pretty cheeks pricing. I pay less than double that for symmetrical gig speed.
I pay $65 a month for Verizon Fios with Symmetrical gigabit
Tell me where you live. I want to go to there.
Massachusetts lol. Rent will run you $2500 a month, and houses start at $500K. Taxes aren’t great either. Welcome!
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 inexpensively 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 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.
I thought I was overpaying for my 1500Mbps at £75
Thank you EU for your many blessings.
lol now comes australia: $109 for 100/40, and that’s a good deal because our conservative government fucked everything and pissed away $40bn
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
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.
