Asklemmy

Speed should be the same (as in ping), the bandwidth is half of it. If you are alone 50Mb/s should be more than enought for people who don't need to download huge amounts of data quickly.

So if you don't build operating systems from source code, don't need to download huge games on a regular basis, don't work as a editor with huge video files you share with others, don't do p2p pirating, and similar things, I don't think you will see a big difference.

If you're a big family where everyone starts streaming youtube or twitch/netflix or do alot of voice/IP calls when they come home at the same time, then you will feel the difference.

You have data caps in the US???? I pay 40 euros a month for a 2Gb/s connection in France with no data cap.

I'm betting $100 on you running back to your ISP's nearest office to extend your plan within a week.

I thought I was overpaying for my 1500Mbps at £75

Thank you EU for your many blessings.

You guys get more than 1MB/s?

To me in Italy, which generally has shitty internet by europe standards, your rates are horrifingly terrible, expensive, and inexplicably capped. I pity your network

Make sure you’re not mixing up MBps and Mbps. Internet speed is almost always measured in megabits (Mbps) not megaBytes (MBps), the former being 1/8 of the equivalent megabytes per second.

55 megaBYTES per second is just fine, that’s a full HD movie download in about 3 minutes. 55 megaBITS would be about 24 minutes for the same thing. Would that matter to you? No idea. But if you’re currently at 100, everything would take about twice as long as before the switch regardless.

Last summer I switched to Tmo 5G home internet. At my location it beats the 100/20 cable plan I had at half the price. YMMV, my last house only 1/4 mile away it was unusably slow, like 20/1

May I ask what city and state you live in? These options seem terrible.

I was on 50 max for a while, it's perfectly fine for pretty much everything but big downloads will take longer

(I was gaming online on voice chat at the same time my family was streaming and there wasn't any issue)

I have just upgraded to 500mb for about £35 a month though your pricing is rough

Speed wise 55Mb/s is fine. Higher speeds are nice for game downloads/etc but that's plenty. I had to live with 3Mb/s until a couple years ago, and we were able to have multiple people watching Netflix/etc on different devices. Not 4k obviously, but surprisingly good video quality for the amount of data available.

The data cap could be a problem though. You'll probably be fine if you don't download many games, but that's an easy cap to hit these days.

I went from 100 Mb/s to 50 Mb/s about 1.5 years ago, and to be honest it is enough but can be an annoyance. Streaming is no Problem, even two concurrent 4k streams work (tried on youtube, Netflix and Disney+). Downloads just take a while so if you have to download larger files you need to plan ahead a bit. Also, streaming while performing large downloads is tricky. In order to avoid constant buffering you'll need to either significantly reduce your streams quality or set um some priorisation rules on your network.

Wow that is expensive.

In NZ I'm on a 300/100 plan with no data cap, for $77/month. That is about $43USD/month.

In terms of bandwith to stream things you won't have a problem. Some high quality stuff can get to around 55Mbps (bits per second). But most streaming services send you the lowest quality shit imaginable so you're probably using less than 20 at any given moment.

That data cap is much more concerning to me, how much streaming do you do? At 10Mbps (typical streaming quality) that's about 3 straight days of watching video which sounds like a lot. But many AAA games are >100GB in size and that's 1/3 of your data right there.

I regularly self throttle to 5 Mbs – you’ll survive.

If anything there might be a slim chance that you’ll hit your data cap of 350gb.

Assuming you’re just doing 480/720p streaming you should be good. But if you download 2-3 recentish games that might kick you over.

You might try turning on data gathering on your router if it offers it to see how much you are using.

I pay $15 / mo for 600 Mbps symetric in Thailand. But I go off the beaten path with just my cell as a hotspot which is 10 Mbps for $90 annually. I can do almost anything I want with even those speeds—just make sure you are blocking ads (uBlock + DNS) to stop all the sludge from gauming up your pipes.

I've been gaming and streaming most of my life with sub-30mbps download and sub 15 upload speeds, didn't have symmetrical 50+ until a year ago.

As others have said, you have to plan ahead. If you need to download something large, let it be and go do something else while it does its thing. Streaming high quality on two screens or more is doable but you'll buffer eventually.

You can probably set up some rules on your router to prioritise whatever device you deem most important, however. Although, if its important enough to warrant a rule on your router, it would probably be better to just plug an ethernet cable in anyway.

DSL is the only thing available-outside of Starlink--in my area. My service is rated at 25Mbps. For almost everything it's fine. It will take most of a day to download a PS5 game, but it's fine for streaming video.