You can honestly get by with a lot less than a gig. If you figure 25 to 30mbps per device, which would be the maximum that it would use times the number of devices being used simultaneously that’s what you realistically need. We have been let down the path to believe that we need to have a gig or more in our homes.
They are almost certainly combining their internet+phone into one price, likely because they're getting it from the same company.
Additionally, some places have flat fees for water + usage that make it so that you will pay a minimum of $100 no matter how much water you're using. If she's living in a hot area, the AC can eat up an electric bill for sure.
Even if you reduce these things to whatever you think is reasonable, realistic or not that comes out to maybe a couple of hundred a month at most. Doesn't include things like gas for the vehicle, groceries, etc. To say nothing of emergencies, like needing to repair your car or what have you. So then it comes down to what exactly are you guys arguing about, here? That things a perfectly affordable? Inflation isn't real? Wages HAVE kept up, despite all economic data showing they haven't? That the economy has actual, non-ai hallucinated legs? Cmon.
At most you could say it is unrealistic for this person to live alone. That in itself is not good. Like, that shouldn't be true. That's worth complaining about.
But secondly, I invite you to go out and find a roommate. Live with them for a year or two. Report back.
I've been without a shower for almost 2 weeks because my roommate poured her cat's litter down the drain in the tub. The roommate before that had a stable job history and everything was going great. The tariffs destroyed his job and he was unable to pay rent and we had to leave and go separate ways. Roommate before that had zero issues for a whole year, their car broke down, then they had a mental breakdown and it imploded everything. I vetted like crazy. But you just have no idea what it is you're getting into and it costs you big. Maybe you do pay more for living alone, but there are some pretty compelling upsides to it as well that may mean it is a smarter, more stable decision.
Bro what do you mean it's "unrealistic" to live alone. I get what you're saying but I'd save up while living in my car and hitting truck stop showers before living with people I didn't already know before, for the reasons you are saying and much more (and I'm a man so I can only imagine if you're a woman staying with even one random man).
It's gross that "starter homes" are basically impossible to save for while paying for rent. You basically need to be making 6 figures or have some other kind of arrangement where you can save a lot of money like living with your parents or 3 close friends.
Regardless it's possible, I live alone in my own home. I physically cannot be around people for more than a set amount of time everyday and would be on some Les Stroud shit before living with my own friends even. I can't even imagine not showering for that long too
By home, do you mean home that you've bought/mortgaged? Becuase if you're also not in the renting bracket of income, this is not a coherent conversation on that front.
It's easy to say you'd live in your car and shower at such and such. I tried that before and got fired from my job. They didn't like that I was homeless and living in my car. Also, it's just inherently unstable. You have cops dogging you all the time. They find your hiding spot where you're parking and sleeping for the night and keep threatening you with tows and jail until you find a new spot and it starts all over again. Plus the wear and tear on your car is not good, and the situation makes it much harder to find another job that is capable of getting you moved into your own place.
You say you physically can't do be around anyone, but all that tells me is you haven't faced for real homelessness. It doesn't matter how strongly you feel about anything. Until you're down there in the dirt and your for real primal, animal instinctive desperation kicks in, you have no idea what your actual limits are. That's just the truth.
OP said it "wasn't good" to say it's unrealistic for this person to live alone. I think you guys are agreeing here...but living out of your car isn't really a viable option either.
Just out of curiosity, why did they pour cat litter down the shower drain instead of into the garbage? That seems like something that anyone over five years old would know not to do.
You're telling me. I thought the same thing. I wish I knew.
It was one of those things where the context and the act itself was just so.... obvious, I just cannot accept this person doesn't know what they're doing with stuff like this. I think they're just so depressed they can't really cope. I've tried to talk to them about it, but they can't even admit they're depressed.
5gbps here. I do the same. Constant gaming, downloads, movies, shows while others in the house also stream movies and shows constantly in 4k+ etc. We don't want to make anyone else in the house slowdown if we hit the absolute max of any of these devices (usually 1gbps theoretically, some lower than others).
I have 100MB and it's more than enough and I work from home. Even when I had 20MB 4 years ago it was still enough for 4 different people to stream shows while I was working from home.
How is every member of a family of 4 possibly saturating 250Mbps? I have 500Mbps and never saturate that even with concurrent torrenting, 4K Netflix, gaming, etc.
Unless you're downloading/uploading massive amounts of data, you don't need massive bandwidth. There's barely a single internet service that would deliver anything to you at those speeds anyway.
Some of us want the maximum speed we can manage, which in some devices can hit 1gbps. Me personally I don't want to wait longer for a large game download that's over 200gb for example. I want it done asap and over with. All the while not slowing down two other people streaming 4K movies and shows, also downloading games on their devices, also not willing to have it set to a specific slower speed. We pay for 5gbps so theoretically any of us could fully saturate a device without compromising speed for anyone else at any time.
It's cool to have, but it's unnecessary for 99% of people. Nobody is downloading multiple 200GB games per day. And any decent router will have good enough QoS so nobody else would notice during the download anyway.
I'm not saying it's bad to have an internet connection that fast. I'm just saying there are decreasing benefits once you get over a certain speed.
Not if you saturate the whole connection and the rest of the house needs to have streaming of some kind, smooth internet, and other downloads and gaming. I'm like the tech/gaming guy in the house and I saturate the whole connection downloading games constantly, streaming shows and movies in high definition and high bitrate, etc. And I'm not compromising by making myself limited to only a strict portion of speed, so we have a 5gbps connection. Overkill sure but we don't mind. As long as that means any of us could theoretically saturate a full or even half full 1gbps connection without causing issues for anyone else in the house then that's how you do it.
This post reminds me of the post where the guy makes $17,500 a month and says he’s living paycheck to paycheck and the breakdown includes $3000 a month spent on onlyfans and like $5000 on travel/shopping lmao
Lol I do just fine with 500 Mbps for $50 a month. $280 sounds like business class, that would be the first thing you can do - switch your plan. But it sounds like you need a better paying job or a second one just to afford the basics.
Yeah. Here in The Netherlands about 90% of the entire housing stock now has access to glass fibre internet. In cities it's everyone and it runs all the way to your front door.
My area had 1 provider for anything higher than DSL. So you either paid $200 a month, or used your phone as a hotspot. We just earlier this year got GloFiber, so now we have 1 good option.
The cable companies colluded to make sure they didn't compete for regions. So you either had Xfinity for $200 or Blue Ridge for $250. Glad GloFiber is moving in and everyone is switching.
I can only assume that includes all internet related expenses as well, probably an assortment of subscriptions, phone bill, possibly payments on a phone, etc.
I get 10 gb for 40 or 45 I forgot. It's a new service company but originally it was 60 bucks a month and they lowered it to 45 just because they wanted too.
If that also includes a paid email subscription like for gmail storage space, any streaming services, and their cell phone, I could see that maybe being the case.
99% of people don't even need that much... Unless you're downloading dozens of gigs a day. There's nearly no reason for the vast majority of people to have that much, unless they just like paying extra money?
Been using a PC for 25 years and I have never had a reason to have over the shittiest tier of whatever I have. Yeah downloading games and other stuff is nice on gig internet but I’ll take $30 a month internet and have to wait 10 extra minutes before I ever get gig internet. Only time I’ve had it is when there was a promotion then I downgraded it right after. ISP’s are scummy and predatory with their “how many people will be using the internet/how many devices?” And if someone answers even 2 devices they’ll claim you need a gig internet. 100-300 is plenty if you aren’t hosting something permanent with high traffic.
The shittiest tier of internet available to me is 300mbps and for my parents its 60mbps. I am not quite sure how anyone can say that a 60mbps connection is enough in 2026. Every single day for the last month there has been periods of time where I have utilized at least 400mbps+ throughput according to my router. If that's sustained for a minute, that is going to be 5-10 minutes on the base tier connection.
Right now I am just casually using 50-60mbps watching netflix according to my router. When Path of Exile released a patch, I was able to download at 800mbps sustained for the 30 minutes it took to download; that would have taken 20 times longer, nearly an entire day using the shittiest internet tier.
Its not uncommon for me to use 1-2tb/month of data and its just not possible to download that much on such a slow connection without leaving my PC on overnight.
I have three people all watching 4k video or gaming whilst also streaming video and being on their phones etc. all my security cameras and appliances too for that matter. I don’t know why my microwave needs to text me that my burrito is done but it does. 2gb for me still slows down during peak hours
And if you get gig internet, you're going to have to overhaul your equipment to the latest and greatest to be able to take advantage of it, especially over wifi.
I'm running 30/5 with 7 people with top tier wifi-5 AC spec hardware (10 years old at this point).
I run a couple of fancy programs to deal with bottlenecks, but for the most part, nobody complains. Most people don't complain about bad internet. They complain about bad wifi.
Higher speeds doesn't fix bad latency with bad wifi, but that's exactly what they tell people.
I've only ever gotten the 300-400mb tiers. I play games, I watch YouTube. 400mb is more than I need, but there isn't a lower tier. I'm paying $40/month.
It’s not a stretch. Most things you download from have server upload limits and bottlenecking issues where you can only download something so quickly whether you have 500 mb/s down or 4 gig down. There are very few platforms that have massive content delivery infrastructure such as Steam, Xbox/Playstation and some google services like Drive that allow you to get the most out of your speeds.
I don’t know how often you’re downloading from these things and it can be worth it if you download stuff a lot but I have never felt inconvenienced by download speeds with how often I do personally. The vast majority of people do not need a gig internet. Most people use it for general browsing, game downloads and streaming which 300 is plenty for. That said if you can get a gig for only $10 more a month over 500 then I can see it being worth it. It’s closer to $30 more where I live.
Offering a more technical view so people can be subjective about what they personally need. Apologies on the length.
Server upload limits do apply yes, but generally that's only an issue for private hosted services and those are not likely used for most of the things people would download in large file sizes today (i.e. movie / tv show streaming, podcasts / audio content streaming, games, etc.). For all the particular content I just mentioned, they get hosted on CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) that have massive amounts of throughput to handle the load on them. Good design architecture will also have load balancers to help distribute traffic load before hitting or coming from the node [hosting server]. It's designed to handle A LOT of requests at once, meaning its not the limiting factor to your download / upload performance (usually).
Further to that, these networks are designed to be distributed to localization cloud setups, that is, the nearest data centers to your major city would typically house a copy of the file content. This way, when you make a request for the content, instead of the file(s) coming from the source server, you're getting the file(s) from a proxy server that's closer to you and has a copy of the data.
Thus, based on where you live actually plays more of a factor of how well a connection will perform and what speed you need, than anything else. The closer you are to a larger city, the less you need a faster connection generally (unless you'll have a lot of usage between other services - capacity & throughput basically but we'll get to that in a sec). This is because the speed is really only a concern from the local CO (central office), which is generally a node somewhere in and around your neighbourhood region, probably covering a 1km / 0.6 mile radius range, for redundancy and performance reasons (the "last mile" service delivery and where your purchased speed plays a factor). That is of course in dense urban and sub-urban zones (cities). If however you're more situated to rural, well then the closest CO (if they even have one) would be magnitudes of distance further. Suddenly the speed at which you can throughput matters and for two reasons - lets get into that specific.
How things are marketed to people with internet speeds is called bandwidth, but that term is actually kind of tricky. Bandwidth represents both a speed, but also a quantity (thus a capacity). The median (cable type) typically determines how fast information will travel (so 1gbps copper [limited to 300 meter range] VS 1gbps fiber VS 10gbps fiber, etc.). This is what is measured as your bandwidth speed. But bandwidth (really should be known as your throttled speed from your provider) is also representing the max capacity of data you can handle concurrently on the median, as in both upload and download. This is generally considered bandwidth throughput and that's where performance and a larger "pipe" really plays a factor.
Best way to think of this is like lanes on a highway VS the speed of the highway. If you increase or decrease the speed, of course there will be a slight impact to the time you are able to get from point A to B. But this is actually more influenced by how many cars are on the road (known as using up the bandwidth). Be extension, the amount of lanes are a greater indicator of how fast you'll be able to travel compared to the speed limited to the travel median (the highway / road, etc.). In English: the more lanes you have, the more traffic you can handle and the faster that traffic can technically move.
The metaphor starts to get real interesting when you dive down the road of capacity management (pun intended). But I'll leave that to people's individual curiosity and research.
All this to say, one's individual needs for connectivity and speed is incredibly circumstantial to many things, including where they live, their proximity to the closest data centers, how many other customers are on their provider, how many people are operating in their local area network (i.e. home users / devices), etc. etc.
God? No haha but thanks for the laugh. In fact, networking wasn't even my strongest knowledge domain. I just had the privilege of working areas in the field of it as I worked towards getting to do what I actually wanted to do.
I know sharing a lot sometimes triggers people the wrong way but in this particular circumstance, the hope was that by having any additional understanding of how it works, people can understand better what they need - and can then hunt for an appropriate level service at the right price.
I hope people didn't think I was trying to get anyone to lean one way or the other because I think the message from the person I was replying to has some weight. If you don't need to pay for the premium service, a lot of times you can get away with not doing it. But it's also ok if you're prioritizing your user experience and thus want the premium service, so long as you can afford it.
kudos on the choice of username. Hope you have a good day / night wherever you are.
I have Starlink Max. DL ~200 maybe up to 300 at times, UL 30-60. Run my whole house on it. Streaming, email, video calls, camera access while away.. 120 bucks
increases in speed/power/storage feel useless until they enable a step-change in usage. Like streaming, as an example.
1->8gbps doesn't enable a step change imo, but 1-100 would. You could have a 128GB SSD and still play 150GB games. steam could have a new mode called fast-play (idk they could market a better name), where steam downloads the game for you in loading screens, rather than storing it on disk.
Obviously game streaming exists, but some people don't like the latency.
Or maybe people would still want it entirely on their SSD while playing and then removed when finished, would still mean you could get by playing a ton of different 150GB games with only 256 or 512GB, and it would only take like 15 seconds to download at the start.
people said the same thing about streaming in general or websites/music over the internet. Humans are pretty bad at predicting the future.
So no, not necessarily niche. It could be niche, it could be the way 90% of gamers load games in the future.
Maybe games will be 500TBs in size and we'll download them in 100GB chunks to load into RAM, because everyone having 8PB sized drives could be harder than everyone having 100gbps internet.
Agreed. So many get suckered into gig speed when the real problem is their home network is poorly configured or has poor coverage. Network speed is rarely the issue.
The speed is whatever, but in the US at least some ISPs still have caps. Comcast has a cap of 1.2tb for it's normal service. (Might be higher now, it's been a few years.) I blew through that and more by about 20 days into a month. Led to a lot of charges, ended up just tacking on their unlimited service for an extra $20 a month. This was about 6 years ago or so.. Right now I only pay $71 for no cap, which is fine for me.
Even that is crazy. Get a phone on swappa for cash, get a cheaper phone, whatever. You can get Mint Mobile for like $50. You can get T-Mobile 5g for like $50. There are cheaper options. Might not be what you WANT but they get the job done if you don't have the income for more.
Mine is 125 download, 40 upload which is plenty for working from home, Netflix, and online gaming for a single person household. That costs me £46 a month in the UK and tbh my deal isn’t great. No phone line because who has a landline anymore, so if I include my mobile sim contract that’s another £25 a month so a total of £71 or still under $100 a month.
I've stopped caring about them about 10 years ago, when they became too much already. The longest thing I've ever downloaded was about 100gb and it took about 15 minutes anyway.
FR, maybe they meant cell phone plus internet? But that’s still crazy expensive. I’m calling rage bait, the budget doesn’t even make sense what they’re counting and they can get those numbers way down. Especially apartment (depending on where, but $1600 is a house payment in a lot of places)
I get only 500mbs at $100. Spectrum is the only service that is in my area. Electrical company has 1gb speeds but they said they're not laying any new lines.
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u/Billy_Plur 1d ago edited 1d ago
Ikr? I have 2gig speeds for $95
EDIT TO CLARIFY:
I get 2g speeds, as in my home internet up/down reaches 2gbps.