Question enough speed...

[SPECOPS70]

Hello all.

At home we have 3 gaming computers. several xbox's. several cell phones. Tv's etc.

Right now I have a 1 mbps plan with astound. Would i be ok with a 300 mbps plan be fine?

BEst.

 

[Darkbreeze]

I don't see why not. I only have a 100Mbps plan in my home and I have no problems at all with me, my mother, my nephew all on PCs online while my niece and sister are on their phones browsing or streaming simultaneously, or streaming Amazon/Netflix videos or downloading whatever is needful.

Even for 3-4 devices with occasional large downloads, HD quality streaming and multiple users places like highspeedinternet.com only insist that something around 40Mbps is "recommended" so 300Mbps is totally fine. More important is probably ensuring that your service is through a company known to actually provide consistent throughput that is at, near or above the advertised speed. 300Mbps plan isn't much good if you're consistently only getting 25Mbps so make sure it's somebody that has at least moderately good service like Verizon or Xfinity. And no, I'm not talking customer service because we know just about all of the big players suck in that regard these days, just actual service.

 

[bill001g]

If you currently can even use the internet at 1mbps you would be amazed by even a 10mbps internet connection.

In general the only thing that "needs?" huge bandwidth are game files downloads. It all depends on how much money you want to spend to save xxx minutes of time to have your downloads faster. Now there is a huge difference between it taking half a day on a connection like your and on 100mbps which will take minutes. When you go from say 500mbps to 1gbit you start saving only a very few minutes of download time so your price per minute saved gets very high.

The only other thing you see that wants fairly large bandwidth is watching 4k video streams. On a 100mbps you could have multiple people watching different 4k netflix and others just surfing the web and playing online games.

The faster internet is kinda a deceptive thing the ISP does to get more money. They know the average consumer will not use 100mbps or even 300mbps. They can do stuff like sell 100 people gigabit connection when the shared fiber to their houses can only support 2.5g total. They know very well that the total bandwidth used at the same time by all the users will not exceed their bandwidth. So in effect they sell the same bandwidth multiple times.

 

[Darkbreeze]

I've heard a lot of horror stories about Astound (But that's probably true of almost all ISPs) so it might be worth looking around to see what other options there are. But if you've had good experiences with them, then that's what matters. Often the quality and reliability of a service can be moderately different from region to region. But yeah, at anything between 100Mbps and 300Mbps, you should have zero problems no matter how many people are connecting at once unless you're all doing something incredibly bandwidth intensive at the same time like downloading a 100GB game on four different machines whilst streaming Disney+ in 4k in several locations simultaneously.

 

[SPECOPS70]

Yes my connection is 1 gbps. sorry.

 

[Darkbreeze]

So you are wanting to go from a 1Gbps plan to a 300Mbps plan? Is that right? Should be fine. Unless you do a hell of a lot of downloading of very large files, or do a lot of constant downloading of pretty large files AND are frequently streaming 4k content, you probably won't even notice a difference. Like I said, I have four PCs that are often all online at the same time, plus multiple phones AND Amazon prime/Netflix/Disney+ on 1-3 TVs at any given time and my 100Mbps connection through Xfinity does fine. With 300Mbps which I had before, other than running speed tests I can't really see where I needed that.