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…

  • linearchaos@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    6 hours ago

    Figuring out your bandwidth requirements is easy but not totally stupid easy.

    If you’re going to pull down 4K video on demand figure you’re going to need at least 25mpbs

    Now if it’s just you on the network and you never try to do two things at once that would be more than enough.

    But now let’s say you were trying to pull down one of those ISOs while you’re trying to watch 4K Netflix. If you know what you’re doing and you can such same limits in your apps you could probably get away with 50 megabit per second. Now if you have a family and multiple people trying to watch different 4K streams, that 25 multiplies.

    Now if somebody is trying to be on a zoom call while somebody else is streaming and somebody else’s downloading and ISO, things start to compound and you don’t want the zoom call to suffer. The thing is you’ve got as much of a chance of overburdening your routers capabilities as you do burning through your bandwidth.

    Then consider your Wi-Fi, unless you spend a whole lot of money on your equipment you’re not getting any more than around 350 MB per second per device on Wi-Fi. If you’re wired, of course you can eat the whole gig.

    A reasonably fast starting point for a small family is probably around 100 mbps.

    Steam can give you hundreds of megabits per second but it doesn’t always it depends on where the data is hosted. Torrents can easily saturate as much as you want to give them If you are going after a popular piece of media.

    Looking at my internet history for the past 24 hours with four people in the house and one of them almost constantly watching YouTube I had a couple of peaks around 70 mbps My peak utilization over the past 24 hours is about 8% with an average utilization of 2%.

    More than likely you are 350 is more than enough to handle whatever you need unless you really need to have very very very large files very very quickly or have more than five people streaming at your house.