I’m looking at getting new internet at the house, and they’ve got their different packages (500mbps, 350mbps, 1gbps). I defaulted to “oh, I’ll get the 500mbps, that’s about what I’ve got with the other people”, but then wondered what I’m actually getting from anything that is sending data to me.
I know that this is about speed, not quantity, and so not looking for “I downloaded 800 gigs of linux ISOs last month”, but rather thinking “Youtube probably isn’t going to upload 200mbps to me.” But maybe something like Steam does when I’m downloading a game?
If I only ever have my actual real-world downloads surpass 350mbps a few times a month, then maybe I save myself $10/month and get that instead of 500mbps.
I have a TP-link router with their (updated) firmware/software, not one of those home-built routers with OpenWRT or something like that, so that will probably limit me since I want to know for the whole system, not an individual device and so the router itself is probably what needs to be measured…
As someone who has gigabit, basically the only service that can reliably saturate that is Steam.
Realistically, the right math to do is a ‘how many people are here, and how many 4k streams are going to be watched at once, and how many megabits is that’ since almost nothing else you do is likely to do a sustained saturated use of your throughput for most (read: non-super-nerdy types) people.
Also if you have to ask, then you’ve never noticed and are in that ‘don’t really care’ zone, and you can probably get whatever you want and be fine.
I don’t even have gigabit and if I try to download a game from Steam, it seems to eventually catch up to the disk and has to pause while the data is being written to disk. This is to an SSD.
If I was the only person in the house I wouldn’t pay for gigabit, I’d just go for a couple hundred and that would be heaps. 100 would likely be plenty for most people too. But if you do a lot of downloading I probably wouldn’t want less than that if I had the choice.
Downloading those “Linux ISOs” via torrent will absolutely saturate any residential internet connection if it’s well seeded.