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 $70 for…10MB in my location (Fucking awful)
Mediacom says they can’t even service my area (then how come I see your vans around where I am with other customers?)
You have data caps in the US??? I pay 40 euros a month for a 2Gb/s connection in France with no data cap.
40 euros! Paying just 30€ for 10Gb/s in Portugal…
80$ for 200Mbps fiber here in Costa Rica
laughs in 25Mbps for $60 in Australia
$106 for 1.2G cable in Oregon, US - when it works. Praying for the day we get fiber in our neighborhood - it was infinitely better. They DO list a data cap but never enforce it. I think if they did, the town would burn down the office.
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.
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
May I ask what city and state you live in? These options seem terrible.
Des Moines Iowa.
Yes I know the options are terrible and I am aware if alternative ISPs but my apartment management only offers just one ISP. It is not Verizon or any other big name, just some not so well known company with a site design from the 90s in every bad way.
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.
Tried doing an area search, only got a form for my address to notify me when service is available.
Oh bummer. I used city hall as the address, since that’s all I had to go on.
Maybe T-Mobile home Internet is good enough?
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!
I’m betting $100 on you running back to your ISP’s nearest office to extend your plan within a week.
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
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
