I ask because I feel I need to save some money in the oncoming months. Currently, I pay over $76 for 100MBps/1000GB cap. And I don’t think it’s a bad deal, but they’re going to be hiking it up to $90+ by next October and I feel it is not worth that. But I also need to save money too.
What is the difference between 55MB and 100MB when it comes to speed? The cap for the 55MBps plan is 350GB and I tried asking if that could be altered but the ISP says they can’t. This plan will cost me $30 a month.
All I ever do anymore is just stream YouTube, sometimes Hulu/Netflix/Tubi. Occasionally I’ll download a game or two, multiplayer gaming is non-existent.
Edit: There’s been a lot of good responses replied to this and I appreciate it.
I’m leaning towards on downgrading with the volume of people that suggest that it isn’t that bad, but it boils down to preferences and habitual behaviors when using the internet. With so many games already downloaded and being left to just streaming/Second Life, I think it warrants the change.
I just wish that my ISP would’ve kicked up the cap to 500GB because that’d sweeten the deal much more but this ISP is not well known and these kind of ISPs operate on different worlds than the big names.
Furthermore, people have suggested going 5G Wireless but the problem with that is that my apartment management is stingy as fuck so it’s not an option for me nor does Verizon say that they can offer a plan in my current location. Fiber connections such as Google Fiber, MetroNet .etc aren’t an option.
Century Link seems to only offer $70 for…10MB in my location (Fucking awful)
Mediacom says they can’t even service my area (then how come I see your vans around where I am with other customers?)
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 watch maybe 2-10 videos a day. Lengths between 2 minutes to a couple videos clocking an hour. I do not watch anything beyond 1 and a half hours unless it is a movie and that video is interesting enough.
I sometimes have audio streaming for background noise when sleeping but audio streaming is practically chump change so it is no factor.
Game downloading averages 100MB to 4GB at most with bigger games rarely ever being a thing.
A single 1080p Netflix stream will consume about 4Mbps.
If you just stream music and media and browse the net, that’s an easy way to benchmark. If you’re gaming, higher speeds will not increase performance of online gaming - this requires quite little and depends more on latency (satellite/star link vs cable/fiber etc). The higher speeds will only help with more concurrent users or game/media downloads (if you pirate media, for example).
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.
I started on a 50Mbps plan which was a massive upgrade from what Comcast offered at the time, so I was pretty pleased with that. At one point I noticed something dragging down my connection, and found signs of people attacking my servers. That was easily dealt with, however what surprised me was the speed of the traffic I was seeing. After blocking the attack I pushed up my torrents and realized I had been upgraded to a 100Mbps connection and didn’t realize it (I really do love my local provider!).
So yeah, for general web browsing you probably won’t notice any difference between those two speeds. If you are downloading specific content then of course the downgrade will take twice as long, and as others mentioned it shouldn’t affect your streaming speeds at all.
It depends… you say several times “I”. So yeah if it is just you, 55 is likely fine.
If you are the only one, watching something, then yeah likely you’ll be fine
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 would expand this to say that it matters how many people in the household. For one person, 55 Mbps is fine for streaming video and 350 GB is fine for downloads, unless you’re d/l multiple AAA games. 350 GB might also cause trouble if you do significant cloud backups.
If you’re in a household of 4 people, that 350 GB is likely to bite, and 55 Mbps is likely to struggle if you’re all watching something different.
For context, my family of 5 has used 1.7TB/mo on average this year. That’s gaming, video and music streaming, and regular interneting. And all that without downloading large files most of the time, occasional OS updates withstanding for 10 always on devices. We’re on 500/500 fiber and it never skips a beat. Usually the bottleneck is the WiFi being on WiFi 6 or the server on the other end not being able to keep up (Netflix’s Tysons fight comes to mind). I haven’t seen the need to up it to 1G or 2.5G yet. This is with no enforced cap (we’re lucky enough to have competition on the backbone so it’s unlikely to be enforced). The OPs cap would absolutely be a no go in this setup. Not sure what the OP’s usage and needs are though.
I’m not an expert but I think you should be fine on the lower one. My understanding is that most plans wildly overemphasize what you need for an activity. Like they’ll say the most expensive one is for gaming but in reality the cheap one would work completely fine for a single person.
I used to have 55mbps and I never had any issues. You won’t be downloading huge games in minutes but just plan ahead and you’ll be fine.
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.
It definitely is, middle of nowhere Indiana here - I’m getting 1000/1000 for $95 and no cap. But I’m lucky enough to be in a location with competition, lots of areas in the US only have one option so they get charged whatever the ISP wants.
95 fucking dollars a month?!? And you reckon that’s a good deal?
I’d call it Stockholm syndrome but even the Swedish know you’re getting fucked up the ass 😂
It’s a better fucking deal than $76 for 55mbps lol
For ~$100USD/month 4000/4000, no caps.
For ~$80USD/month 2000/2000, no caps.
For ~$60USD/month 1000/1000, no caps.
I have 800/300, no caps, for like 30€/month. Those prices are insane.
I pay $5 for 100Mb/no cap. I’m not from the US though
That is cheap compared to NZ
I pay that much for 6/0.512
I’m not sure what to say…that really sucks.
May I ask what city and state you live in? These options seem terrible.
I was thinking the opposite. I have 1 option for “high speed” in my town, and it’s $90 for 12Mbps that rarely actually gets to that speed. I just barely switched to starlink and it’s been amazing.
Yeah that’s pretty cheeks pricing. I pay less than double that for symmetrical gig speed.
I pay $65 a month for Verizon Fios with Symmetrical gigabit
Tell me where you live. I want to go to there.
Massachusetts lol. Rent will run you $2500 a month, and houses start at $500K. Taxes aren’t great either. Welcome!
Why does your apartment management have a say in it?
If there are other providers in the area then you likely already have lines running to your place and shouldn’t need their sign off on it.
Because they are the shitty kind. Here is what I do not get, I have seen CenturyLink and Mediacom vans come in my area. I assume it is to service people’s connections or other things. If my apartment management tells me that VisionSystems is all that they can offer, why do I see vans from other ISPs come here?
And Mediacom isnt too far from us either.
Mediacom and CenturyLink claim to not service my building though so something is not adding up.
That is really shady. Unless you live in a rent controlled apartment I’d be curious if they even have legal recourse if you used another provider unless there was damage to the apartment.
You could probably force the complex to let you use whatever provider you wanted as long as the infrastructure (conduits in the ground etc) is there and it probably is. But I would likely be a very annoying fight.
More than likely they are getting a kickback from the ISP to inform users that they are the only option.
We have a (kind of) similar situation here. Our complex has these devices installed by the local electric company that turns our water heater on and off on some randomized schedule that is claimed to be based off of our usage and the local time. We were never told about this device and it’s not in our contract. On top of that, the property management group gets a kickback for every one that is installed in a unit.
We don’t have the most stable schedules (random schedules, night shift, day shift, etc) so of course the device couldn’t figure it’s shit out and was just shutting our water heater off at different times. I had to call the power company to have them disable it.
There has been a history of corporate things like this happening where providers do shady shit, kinda like gangs having their own territory and “agreements” not to sell dope in each other’s area to keep their profits stable and not mess with each other or whatever other reasoning it may be.
My point is, there is more than likely some shady business practices going on between the ISPs and the property management.
This practice is allowed and it sucks. Try wireless.
Try tmobile’s wireless internet. They usually have an option to try free for 30 days. Depending on where you live it can be a great alternative.
Maybe T-Mobile home Internet is good enough?
Note to self. Do not move to Des Moines. I pay $60/mo for symmetrical gig (1000 Mbps) with no cap.
May I humbly suggest Verizon 5G home internet. I checked and it’s widely available in Des Moines. Around $45 a month with a discount if you also have Verizon mobile. 300mbps down and like 30 up. No caps. It’s just a white box that uses cell towers, so you are not limited to whatever shitty service your apartment complex has contracted with. I used it for 2 or 3 years in Providence, RI, and it was terrific. Cheap, fast enough for my work needs and streaming on 2 TVs, and I never had any problems.
Oh bummer. I used city hall as the address, since that’s all I had to go on.
I’m at 70 Mbs. That’s enough for 3 people streaming on various devices and one kid gaming.
350 GB for $30 sounds terrible. I’m in the EU but we get unlimited plans for that amount.
I don’t think it’s necessarily horrible but with slow WAN speeds it might be worth it to set up a DNS caching server and potentially caching proxies for whatever services you use (this used to be easier for generic HTTP before encryption).
For example, macOS has Content Caching for caching Apple software updates. You can also cache repositories for several Linux distributions, Docker, stuff like that too.
hoping to start a community intranet as the internet sucks and is shit nowadays
55mbps down will be enough when lower cost is most important. it’s about the download speed we have at the office (55mbps), and at home too (faster but network gear is slower than the pipe coming in, so 55-60mbps is what i get on the main pc).
we can have a remote desktop going with multimedia coming through that (for work; low bitrate but latency matters), 2-3 hd streams, a couple screens on web sites, something downloading a huge batch of updates, an online ‘shooter’ game being played, and still not worry about loading up something else to use some more.
for straight downloads from servers and cdn that can handle it, expect 2-4 minutes for a typical linux iso download, and for big downloads about 25 gigabytes per hour max.
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.
