Question 1/2 gig or 1gig service for home?

[axlrose]

We need to switch plans per new service with our ISP. Speeds have always been slow (ruralish) but we can get gig service now. I have two teens and lots of devices in our family of four. It's twenty dollars more a month for gig vs half gig.

Thanks for any experiences with similar situations.

 

[bill001g]

It will come down to how many huge games do you download a month and how much per minute you save each month do you want to pay.

Pretty much if you ignore downloading of very large games most households do not need even 100mbps. You can watch multiple 4k netflix streams at 30mbps, play online games that use maybe 1mbps and surf the web which also uses almost nothing.

Things do not run faster or better just because you have a gigabit or even 5gbit plan. Things like netflix will only use what they are designed to need and having more bandwidth will make no difference.

The exception is if you say download some huge 20gbyte file it would take you about 2.5 minutes at 1gbit and about 5 at 500mbps. Lets say you do this 4 times during a month. In your case you pay $2/minute you save.

In a lot of cases having fast internet is a bragging right more than something you really need. It all depends on how much you actually download in a month. If you have teens who constantly steal copyrighted content via torrent maybe it would be of value. Then again you could spend the extra $20 to legally buy more content instead