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…
I don’t think you’ll be complaining on any of them. Was having gigabit nice? Of course, but 350 is plenty. Most services won’t even transfer that quickly to you and you can run a lot of video streams on that.
But the main way to tell would be if your router has a traffic meter on it since it has all devices going through it. Otherwise if you’re mainly on PC you can use the task manager to see how much is going on and out
This is what got me. There are 5 of us in our household and all of us have devices. 500/500 is what I went with even though I could have 1Gb/1Gb. Most of the time 500/500 is faster than the servers we’re on. I don’t do a ton of download images or anything and we’ve never had an issue streaming 4K/gaming all at once so on it we sit. I just don’t see the point of moving to 1Gb. I’ll probably have to be forced onto it in the future. My service has 2.5Gb in places and is looking to go 10Gb at some point. That’s just completely unnecessary currently and would be a waste of money for most.