50mbps vs 100mbps cable internet?

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So our company was paying for internet connection during work from home and will end the reimbursement soon. We upgraded from the previous 50mbps to 100mbps during the reimbursement period when wife, me, 2 kids were zooming all day plus some remote desktop work.

Now the 2 kids are back in physical school, and I no longer run 2 meetings at the same time, I'm thinking of only getting 50mbps instead of 100mbps cable internet. Anyone think it make sense doing that to save $15 a month?
 
You probably won't see much difference, if your kids are not heavy at game play at the same time you are streaming a movie or something.
 
Unless you are downloading large files all the time, 100Mbps will not make a noticeable difference over 50. It's surprising how little bandwidth typical network activity uses. Even Zoom, Netflix or other video/streaming services don't typically use more than 10Mbps on their own. My work uses a symetric 50Mb connection and if you look at our bandwidth graphics, we never come close to saturating it, with close to 50 users and 100 devices.
 
You won't see a difference. Your streaming services will "shift gears" to imperceptibly worse quality. And if you really want to geek out you can set up your router's Quality of Service.
 
Unless you use video streaming on 3 or more TVs simultaneously on a regular basis, save yourself some money.
 
my 400mbits service is sometimes 50mbits service with bad lag and packet loss. but that is their network.. not that its 50mbits.

WTB at&t gigabit fiber that stopped 2 blocks from my house.

I could get gigabit spectrum but its about double my 400mbits service and I am NOT going to pay that and get 50mbits randomly(probably congestion)
 


As I surf the interwebz, continually amazed at the number who complain about not being able to get gig internet.
 
As I surf the interwebz, continually amazed at the number who complain about not being able to get gig internet.
Medina eh. I'm over by akron.

If thats in response to me I was more complaining I'm paying for 400 and getting 440 to 20mbit.. not that I'm not getting gigabit.

They seem to have over sold my neighborhood. internet slows to a crawl and websites barely load a couple nights a week.

Its decent tonight if not the "400mbit service"
and in the results below its not even the 39mbit part thats bad.. its 39mbit with packetloss and horrid lag.
image_2022-02-28_202714.png
 
you'll be fine with 50. I have 20 or maybe 25 mbps download since its pretty cheap by att and we all can stream 720p on phones and 1080p on tv's simultaneously. Downloads don't take super long either.

I've hotspotted my laptop with my 660 kbps Verizon phone and strangely enough it wasn't all that bad. Things 2-3 second longer to load but it was alright. 720p was doable if it was under 30fps. 480p was perfectly reliable and doesn't even look that bad.
 
You won't see a difference. Your streaming services will "shift gears" to imperceptibly worse quality. And if you really want to geek out you can set up your router's Quality of Service.
Yes that can make a big difference on slower lines. Especially if one or more users are using a cloud file service that uploads constantly. Proper queue management, (also known as quality of service or traffic control) improves the "loaded ping" or "bufferbloat" measurement in speed tests, which becomes a faster response between requesting something and it starting to load. This gives the impression of higher line speed.

Having put 10 or 20 users onto a 12/1.5 Mb DSL line, 50/10 is plenty for about any house. It is sometimes necessary to buy cable's higher speed tiers to get a larger GB limit though.
 
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Medina eh. I'm over by akron.

If thats in response to me I was more complaining I'm paying for 400 and getting 440 to 20mbit.. not that I'm not getting gigabit.

They seem to have over sold my neighborhood. internet slows to a crawl and websites barely load a couple nights a week.

Its decent tonight if not the "400mbit service"
and in the results below its not even the 39mbit part thats bad.. its 39mbit with packetloss and horrid lag.
View attachment 90795
The issue being is you are going to get the speed that you pay for when the cable company (or whomever) puts it out to you. My speeds are all over the place coming from the street. The cable line-after all in reality is a "trunk line". On Sunday evenings when everybody is home the speeds suffer.

Xfinity/Comcast is the provider and there are not any high speed viable competitors.
 
Assuming a stable connection, if you have anything over 50mbps, 99% of the time any bottlenecks you see are on the other end of the pipe.
Agree, so far my result shows most of my bottleneck is my workplace's VPN. My resolutions at home are all 1080p so nothing stream higher than that if at all. Team meeting are all compressed so if we are lucky we get 720p or even worse 480p.
 
It will be interesting when 5G becomes the norm for all internet use in homes and offices. It will be a while but it's my understanding it is going to be faster than most have now for internet.
 
I would have a very difficult time going back to 50Mbps or anything close to it. Depends on what you use it for. Just downloading updated graphics driver for a PC can approach 500MB or more. I'd rather not wait 80 seconds, so for the extra $30 a month or whatever it is for 1Gb fiber is worth it to me. I don't do cable TV, all my entertainment is via internet, so it's money well spent, plus future proofed.

A few years ago, very few sites could take advantage of a very fast connection. But nowadays, any fairly major/well known site will download at very close to 1Gb in my experience. I live in a rural area with fiber straight to the house, so I likely don't have the congestion that many folks experience in big cities; that might play a factor in whether the extra cost is worth it.

internet.jpg
 
It will be interesting when 5G becomes the norm for all internet use in homes and offices. It will be a while but it's my understanding it is going to be faster than most have now for internet.
My understanding is depends on how far they are from the tower. It may be a good alternative to cable monopoly or expensive fiber. It may also be a good alternative to people who don't want to pay for the phone and their home internet twice and just sign up for one to cover them all, and let their router at home just hotspot to their phone when they are at home.

It may or may not be faster depends on how much they sell the service for.
 
I would have a very difficult time going back to 50Mbps or anything close to it. Depends on what you use it for. Just downloading updated graphics driver for a PC can approach 500MB or more. I'd rather not wait 80 seconds, so for the extra $30 a month or whatever it is for 1Gb fiber is worth it to me. I don't do cable TV, all my entertainment is via internet, so it's money well spent, plus future proofed.

A few years ago, very few sites could take advantage of a very fast connection. But nowadays, any fairly major/well known site will download at very close to 1Gb in my experience. I live in a rural area with fiber straight to the house, so I likely don't have the congestion that many folks experience in big cities; that might play a factor in whether the extra cost is worth it.

View attachment 90804
This will not be anywhere close to the speed I am getting or paying for. I'm getting 100 or 50 down, but upstream is still going to be around 6mbps regardless of package.

Typical usage for me is youtube, Hulu basic (SD), VPN to work maybe downloading some files at about 24mbps max (our server sucks), team / zoom / webex at most 3 at a time (usually 2).

So I "think" even 50 is enough and if I really want to I can go as low as 24mbps.
 
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