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.
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u/FVSHIXN 1d ago
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.