How much Internet (bandwidth) do you need at home?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 2 ก.ค. 2024
- Maybe the greatest debate of the century -- How much bandwidth do you actually need? Is 1Gb an actual needed requirement or a want? Let's talk about it!
Internet speed requirement spreadsheet: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/...
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Time Stamps:
00:00 - Intro
00:10 - How much Internet (bandwidth) do you need at home?
01:07 - Your choices as the consumer
01:35 - Spreadsheet of speeds
02:50 - Calculating bandwidth for 1 person
06:15 - Scaling to multiple people
07:30 - Can one person do multiple things at once
07:50 - How do you judge the bandwidth needed?
08:54 - Wrap-Up
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I have a household of 5 with online school, me working from home, Netflix HD, TH-cam, at least 50 IoT devices and never seen it go more than 20Mbps consistently on a 150Mbps symmetrical service. The ISP's use bandwidth as the selling point but to be honest, they should also talk about their latency, jitters etc. If the latency is high then it really does not matter how much bandwidth you have. I compare bandwidth to the number of lanes on a highway. If you have 100 lanes, it does not mean your car has an upgraded engine pushing more horsepower. But if there is a low latency (point A to B and back) your car will definitely be faster 😉.
When I explain bandwidth to people, I like to compare ISPs to water companies and compare bandwidth to water. With this example, I say that an ISP basically buys access to large water mains that can carry water for thousands of homes. The ISP's primary responsibility is then to build the "pipes" that connect their subscribers to their large water mains. The subscriber then pays the ISP for how much water they want. If it's only one person, they can subscribe to a lower plan and still enjoy a high pressure shower, but if it's multiple people it's important to choose a plan that can support the needs of multiple faucets and/or showers being on.
I got a R2D2 UDM and it was my first router that could tell me my real-time usage. Really opened my eyes to what I ACTUALLY need, and as more consumer routers offer that feature I think more people will realize the same. I honestly think the main issue is people aren't ever logging into their routers and checking on features like real-time usage.
Great video Willie. I've got WOW! where I'm located, and two years in a row now I've got a DL speed upgrade. At the end of 2020 they pushed speed to 100 down and it stayed at a barely sustainable 3 up. At the end of 2021, it was doubled to 200 down and ~10 up.
I'd be happy with 75 down if I could get and sustain 25 up. It's a little crazy.
If I weren't trying to stream (live to YT) from home, it wouldn't be a big deal for the upload speeds.
Nice video. One thing is that if you're saturating either download or upload, without QoS you can potentially cause the other half of the connection to slow down significantly too. This is common on very asymmetrical services where the upload link becomes saturated and impacts download speeds.
I'm on a 100 down / 40 up HFC NBN connection in Australia. Primarily chose this tier for the higher upload speed as I often work from home and need to work on larger files through a VPN, SharePoint, or cloud service. In the evening my son games, which he live streams. Also have a Plex server which we stream from remotely when out, and access CCTV cameras.
Was previously on a 100/5 plan prior to the NBN upgrade and the increase in upload capacity was a blessing, since the uploads were maxing out, which was then impacting download speeds.
Speed tiers in Australia are a little odd due to the poor technology choices made by the current government. The next speed tier up is 250/25 and there's no way I'd sacrifice the upload speed. Above that is 1000/50 but the cost relative to the small gain in upload is too much, and I rarely max out the download speeds to see many tangible benefits in going to 1 gig.
I want all the bandwidths!
Since I'm using VPN to connect to my NAS for me it's more the Upload that matters. Most providers don't offer symmetric connections so you mostly end up with a much higher Download speed than you actually need. I think 50 Mbit down per person should be more than sufficient, upload totally depends on personal use cases
Hi Willie,
We started out with 30Mbps, daughters family moved in from Chicago for a year, they work from home (wife and I are retired so I spend most of the day on my laptop, while wife is watching TH-cam how-to videos, surfing the net and movies. A tough life, but someone has to do it). Well 30Mbps was not going to make it with all of us as with just wife and myself it was iffy. So I opted for 100Mbps. Since the work-at-home part required large file uploads the 100Mbps was even a little iffy at times, for $10/Mo more I upped the Mbps to 500. We cranked everything up to see how it worked and had "ZERO" issues. I failed to mention that I have everything going through my UDM-Pro with security maxed out and still get 463Mbps speed. Kids are gone, but I am not going back to 100Mbps, for $10 a month, I will skip (2) Starbucks Latte coffees each month. All is fine, so far in the last 24hrs we have seen 17.3 GB pass through the UDM-Pro. Spoiled now.
I measured Amazon Prime 4K content at a sustained 15MB (didn't see that listed). Another thing not mentioned is cloud backups which may or may not be a factor depending on what is being backed up, and if it can be scheduled at night. For some bandwidth isn't the issue, but limits on total GB transferred per month. I'm limited to 1.25TB/month (up+down). That isn't a problem right now, but if a lot of 4K content is streaming on multiple devices it would be an issue. Most families are fine with 50/10 unless they are doing a lot of 4K streaming.
The only time i need the larger bandwidth is when i install a new game or there are updates. We play coop games on pcs, so so an immediate need to download >100GB is not rare. The 1Gb/s connection allows that to happen in under 30 min, where our old 50 Mb/s forced the playing of the game to be the following day.
Up until recently our household was still on a 30 Mbps connection. That was with both of us on our work VPN all day. I upgraded us to the 100 plan which shortly there after was automatically migrated to the 200Mbps plan at the same cost. One thing you didn't note is if you really are pushing that 100 Mbps link hard the saturation point won't be 100 it will be somewhere above 80% utilization.
How can we check what the max download speed per ip a server has that we don't have access to?
We have Spectrum (formerly Charter). If they reliably delivered the 200 Mbps they claim, we wouldn't need more. But they only want money, so they keep trying to push bigger packages. Who in their right mind is going to give you another $25 a month for a bump of non-guaranteed, variable bandwidth?
I personally believe people always assume they need more bandwidth then they actually do. If people actually monitored their bandwidth usage, they would realize they don't need as much speed as they think. I tested my network recently with 5 live streams and a backup job running. I did not max out my 120/15 connection even though I was trying. A better example is that I work at a TV station with 110 employees and countless live video streams. We only have a 1 gig symmetrical connection at work and don't max it out because we bandwidth limit certain connections. People would benefit more from QoS (or limiting) then simply getting more speed. Getting more speed will reduce bufferbloat but so will limiting connection speeds so no one user/connection can use all the bandwidth.
In my area FiOS (fiber symmetrical) is a direct connect to ISP from the house and optimum (cable 300 down + 25 up)is shared at the pole and then home run. It's very hard to compare apples to bananas. We had both but currently happy with fiber (300*300 ~50/month). We have 6ppl in the house. We really shouldn't need more than 100. But we shouldn't have extra large sodas either.
You have a family of 4 you buy a family sedan you do not go buy a bus. Most buy excessive bandwidth because of the unknown..
Gaming first ... Steam and practically all others depends as much or maybe even more on transfer speed (ping times) than bandwidth.
As most of us, pro and network experienced persons, know - Unless you are on a "avg speed limited" fiber - bandwidth is a must.
Going from a 300Mb copper (via cable TV coax) to a similar 300Mb fiber, bandwidth limited in the distribution switch from 2xGb fibers, the ping times was reduced from 40+ ms to less than 15 ms.
And then the question of why you need a quality router/firewall that can handle a lot more than your ISP delivers - well the CPU of your router usually does not deliver wirespeed - and the backbone of the 4 port switch of a small "home-grade" router is a limiting factor of your internet connection.
Our setup was a small 5 port Ubiquiti router that worked fine, or so we thought. Getting an upgrade to 450Mb revealed that it was not up to the task - not even at 300Mb (WAN) when you ask it to do a little more than just the default routing and firewalling - the small 500MHz ARM CPU simply couldn't deliver.
Upgrading to the bigger 8 port Edge router Pro made that very clear as the ping time was reduced with a few ms more and those 450Mb suddenly was not just 360-380 Mb but the full 450Mb.
My son gaming and chatting and me often doing remote support, streaming sport TV and updating a few computers at the same time our 450Mb is often stretched pretty hard - would it be nice with a Gb connection oh yeah 😀
The upcoming Home-Cloud-, mail- and VPN relay server will be on its own public connection.
Before you order a Gigabit connection from your ISP, check if your network equipment is able to handle your ambitions ;-)
Thanks for, yet again, a well done video ;-)
Bro. I was managing a network in a residential building. It was around 50 flats occupied , the avarage usage for all these flats were around 50 mbps .
50 flats from single room to 3 bedrooms .
Surely not all of them are in their flats at the same time . Some would work night shifts.
But still that's big number compare to a family house.
And they had no issue with speed
But for me I would say 100 Mbps is more than enough for any villa .
Here in the UK we have a severely under invested infrastructure. I have lived (until recently) with a 2MB down and .5mb up connection. It was hell and it common place where in this area. We recently have a private company install fibre and I now have a 400/400 connection. It feels like jumping into the future and finally I no longer need to worry about bandwidth problems. Do I need 400 - probably not, but it's hella nice! They actually only offer three packages: 200/200, 500/500 or 900/900. We were signed up just after they changed the 400 to 500. But still, I dont think I come close to using all of this.
Hi Willie, I have seen your video created on Jan 7, 2017 for pfsense setup and really grateful to you. I am doing the same kind of setup from last few years for pfsense as well as opensense but few things missing while configuring pfsense to make it 100% full proof against Ransomware and website blocker like content filter & so on. Could you please advise on that. I have seen multiple videos but no clue you have suddenly moved from pfsense to unifi products based firewalls, BDM and other stuff.
I sync my NAS:es between my home and summer cabin and can’t imagine going back to low speeds again
I pay less than 5 USD per month for 500/500 fiber. I can not image how annoying it would be for me to move away from Sweden. (It’s a group connection included in the rent of the apartment meaning you can’t OPT-out of it). These whole-appartment-complex connections are fairly new and before I paid about 25 USD per month for the same connection. Summer cabin is 35 USD a month 500/500 and I think that’s crazy expensive.
Is there a way in Ubiquiti or otherwise to just capture the high water mark and average of your existing bandwidth?
Good topic Willie
I'm an IT consultant working from home, I stream a lot of youtube. Wife is home most of the time and she constantly streams tv of some sort. I used to have a 600/35 connection but to be honest I watched our overall usage, even with the constant streaming our usage is hardly ever over 5mbps with quick 60mbps spikes every few minutes. Our internet was $180 a month so I decided to reduce the speed to 200/10 for $94 per month and to be honest with you I can't tell for the most part. There are times when i'm sending a file I wish I had a little faster connection but hard to justify another $80 just to send a file a little faster a few times a week. I should also mention we live out in the boonies and cell reception is poor so we use wifi calling on our cell phones and I use VOIP on our desk phones and house phone. I'm satisfied with the 200/10 cable connection although at times I do wish the upload was just a little faster. Hardly ever need a faster download. If I could get a 50/50 synchronous fiber connection I would in a heart beat.
Gosh, your internet is really expensive, here in Madrid we have now 10GB Up and Down for 40 USD a month, so the cost is mostly a 10 GB Switch and 2.5 GB Cards for PCs. Do we need it? no :), but at this price who cares.
@@pbrigham I am waiting for my ISP to lower their 10gig rates... Which router are you using for that 10gig connection?
@@DeLoreansgarage The crapy 10GB that comes with the installation from the ISP, waiting from availability from Unifi UDM SE to upgrade.
@@pbrigham I've been installing mikrotik in my house and been checking out the prices for a 10gig router from them
@@pbrigham The UDMP SE has been in EA forever and is likely suffering from the supply chain issues. It may be years for them to reliability manufacture the supply of the SE to meet the demand...
For me, it's always upload speed that's an issue in an async ISP setup. I'm currently on a 100/20 plan which is the fastest I can get in my area. My wife and I both work from home and have to participate in a large number of meetings. We can saturate our upload pretty easily.
I use VPN daily, sending files to and from my VM server host on a 125Mbps connection, I think today it comes down more to the quality of your connection and your set up at home.
Ran fine with 250Mbps with 4 people in house, 1 of them a gaming teen and I'm an IT consultant. 250Mbps was more than enough for our needs, but those communist at Comcast had datacaps that we would breach every month. So, instead of paying overages the only plan I could get with unlimited data was the 1Gb plan. We got it and , aside from speed test, there is no difference.
I get gig fiber for $65 a month and that’s the same price I was getting AT&T for.
Base service in my are is now 300-400 down and 30 up. I do pay for gigabit down only gets me 50 up but gives me almost no downtime except for maintenance windows, which they never tell you about (spectrum) - but they do prioritize those customers and do better maintenance for them.
Me and my wife work from home. Both Zoom during the day , lots of emails, no gaming, files up and down, our Synology NAS has Drive plus Sync with our office and so on. Netflix and IP TvJust the two of us at night, no kids. We had expensive gigabit and just changed to a new small business plan with two public IP , just 200 DSL at 1/3 the cost. Very satisfied with new service . No need for gigabit
it's straight up better to have way more than you need as video services typically start filling a buffer which will periodically saturate low end connections and lag them assuming no QoS
I have 1gb over cable, which I never get in my apt, with the kids doing home schooling in the apt building it is slow. I share my NAS with my sons in college for file share and Plex. In my house the ISP offer fiber to home which is 1gb. I have a NAS, VPN to my apt, security and 2 full adults working from home.
In run on 500/250 mbps. Most of the time it's way more than I need for the everyday stuff as you mentioned. But, when downloading big files, games and so on... Just take a look on the games sizes nowadays it's on the dozens of GB. So, I always go with the fastest that I can get 😂
I only need 50 / 50. For me it is more the upload than the download. The kids can be regulated by QOS bandwidth limits. If it was not regulated intranet, then I would need 150 / 50.
Complete, and total gadgeholic lust. :)
Actually, I work 100% from home and "do data." I have a synchronous 1GB connection and doubt I ever max it out.
With work from home, having that upload bandwidth is nice. Now that I have fiber, I think I could easily live with 100/100, although the 600/600 is really nice for file transfers.
Well you can wait an hour for a big download or a couple of minutes. I think high bandwidth is useful for people who like to be efficient with their time. Usually time=money, so I think it’s a good tradeoff.
Sounds like QOS is a good way to ensure balance. I'd love to see a video on QOS by various platforms (pfsense, Unifi products, etc - is there a difference?). Can you set it up so that you are limited to 10M . . . but if no one else is using the connection you could open up the tap to make use of the full connection? This is something I'd be very interested in setting up.
My household has three working adults that are heavy stream consumers. Two of us are gamers. We have a 75mbps down 55mbps up Fibre to the Curb connection however we can only ever get about 65 mbps down at a maximum and my USG suggests we do hit maximum usage at times during the evening and night when we are all home. I'm paying AU$89/month. I have no data cap.
Before watching I need all the bandwidth.
Our neighborhood is getting 5Gb Internet. We currently have dual wan. One is 300/12 the other is 75/12. I’m thinking about 500/500. Here’s my thoughts. 1. While my router supports 10Gb all of my switches are 1Gb. 2. While I might download large files occasionally my wife is TV and FB. Anything greater. Than 1Gb would be throwing money away since the switches would be a bottleneck. I am debating about 1Gb since it’s not much more. I was already planning to upgrade my network (NAS, switches and APs) to handle higher speeds. I think many people will just buy the higher speeds not realizing they can’t use it.
I've got 30MB down with 6 or 7 MB up on DSL - policed to 5 up and tuned for bufferbloat with an Ubiquiti Edgerouter - to get more consistent results. We do a lot of streaming but only HD. My spouse and I are on on VPN and Zoom + phones most of the day. I VPN and stream at night, I think it meets our needs well enough. I occasionally download a large file - Linux Distro or patch/upgrade and whatnot and I have to be a little patient, but it is fine. If I was a gamer or insisted on 4K resolution I might consider an upgrade. Competition has been poor in my region, but it is starting to heat up. If I could get same up/down speeds with Fiber at the same or lower price I will switch in a heartbeat, even if it is only to 50 MB.
I have always needed more upload than has been offered. My critical download speeds are essentially limited by VPN at roughly 40MB/s, but my upload to AWS is clearly limited by Comcast at 45Mbps. So, do I pay a little extra to get better upload, you betcha, would I trade 1.2G/45M for 500M symmetric? You betcha! Fiber or DocSis 4.0 cannot come fast enough.
In general people think they need more than they do. We have 3 ISP’s for redundancy with a load balancing and bonding router. We average 1.9Gps down and 850Mps up. It’s enough to keep us up and running.
Great video,
I have 200 symmetrical fiber. We never have issues, I like it because of the fast file transfers but could use something lower. My isp (outside of the US) was recently bought and now offers plans with higher downloads speeds but lower uploads for a lower cost, I might consider switching plans.
The most important thing is to know which services that you use consume the most bandwidth and how likely are you too be using them at the same time.
Something that Willie didn't touch on was the latency factor. If you have symmetrical fiber, as you do, the lower latency will be noticeable...
We require a lot less bandwidth that we think because of the "bursty" nature of delivering content (as Willie alluded to). AT&T, however, is capitalizing on the ignorance of millions by rolling out 2.0 Gbps and 5.0 Gbps fiber service in certain test areas. I would say the overwhelming majority of people would be ok on 100/20 VDSL service or 300/300 fiber service.
2 adults, 2 teens...100/10 recently started to bottleneck in the evenings. Multiple 4K streams, pc gaming, TH-cam, phones + a dozen or so iot devices was just too much. Upgraded to 250/20 and don't have any issues now. Max throughput used has been 129...avg is probably 75-90. We'll probably be exceeding the monthly data cap here shortly 😫
Data cap is often more of an issue and something almost no one talks about. Mine is 1.25TB. We don't hit it now (usually about ~700GB), but we also do very little 4K streaming which really eats it up.
Try QoS before adding bandwidth.
Xbox games are now 100gb in size and 1Gbps can download to an ssd in minutes(time equals money when matters). This makes it easy to install & delete games as needed. no more waiting to download huge files. this applies to all the icloud uploads, software downloads, app downloads >200mb etc. And really if you have fiber in your area it has the capacity. go ahead promote the new change and stop paying for DSL internet which is prone to lot of latency issues, remember it's not true gig-speed, it's shared 10gbps router for neighborhood from provider. If everyone using during holidays we get ~300mbps on fiber. I started to notice lot of services cannot support true gig-speed and imagine we can download our data from anywhere in the world at gig-speed and upload sensitive documents if needed. our own web3 decentralized networks.
Fiber in France with 1000 down /400 up, no cap. 20 $ per month. I 'm not calculating which bandwidth should I get anymore.
Could go for 5000 /1000 too for 50 $ but my remote server is still on 100 / 100, it is my weak point.
on 100mb down 10 up. wife streams netflix I stream twitch and youtube and lite gaming, cell phones seems to work well
I lived with 4 guys all of us doing remote leaning for college and 35down 5 up was sufficient because nobody is doing all the theoretical maximums at the same time. As the video shows the upload speeds are more taxed because they are not symmetrical.
I work form home now with a 100down 10up and I wish I just had 30-50 symmetrical. I need the upload speeds!!!
I pay $80/month for FiOS gb. Wife and I both work from home and have one kid.
I use my own Orbi router, so that saved me some money. (Maybe $12/month savings.)
Cheap for $80, I'd rather just have it.
The big question is are they all going on at once... most of the time they are not. The funny thing is working from home both, wife and I. Working from home as a consultant full time. I am piping 1 down and 40 up. I love the speed, I have everything plugged in, WiFi and solid wire. I am have multiple systems on teams, internet, servers running online and for work and testing things. Yes I agree we cannot access all actions at once, Looking at my numbers I generate 2.32 tb of traffic since January 1st. That's hilarious
Most people have a data cap way below 2.32 TB. I get 1.25TB/month.
I agree totally It depends how many in the home and how many actuly actively use the internet for streaming ect. I have 1000mbps available but take there minimum 150mbps and even at the with a family of 4 would easily get away with 40-50mbps constant speeds. Downloading game updates it eeere you can notice the difference but not daily use 1000mbps=100mbps to most people
We are more than happy on a Wireless bridge 20/20. 2 Adults 2 Teenagers. Our main TV we only stream 1080 though and the ISP will allow a burst to 70/70. Despite my reservations to my wife about buying this house because of the available internet, I was vetoed! To be honest its OK.😂
Want (future) need. Gigabit + up/down.
Yeah, but the problem is when you play games and your PS4/5 needs to Download 30 or 40 GB, without Gigabit Internet you can wait 6 hours sometimes.
I have a 1Gbps Fiber connection and wished that 10Gbps was cheaper ($250 vs my $65 for 1Gig) Both of us work from home and we stream play games, have a dedicated Plex server... I use up all of my bandwidth... I understand that I am not a normal user though!
I pay almost $90 for 150/12...and a 1.25TB/mo data cap. Wish there was more competition around here, we don't have any fiber providers.
@@Zeric1 I love my fiber connection and my ISP which is one of the oldest on the internet
Had to leave garbage Spectrum. Had 150/10 which was fine for downloads but killing me for uploads (video/photo export uploads and raw backup). FIOS 500/500 was $50 for a year then $65. But 1G/1G was $80 for 3 years plus two free eero6 I was going to buy anyway. In the end I just went with 1G bc I’m a sucker I guess but it’s been great.
Thanks Willie. Starlink for a family of 4 over here.
20 up regularly / 100-200mbps down.
@UC_l1s65PsM5H63BX5ZxWT-g of 600 packets Win MTR average 53 and worst 380. That worst was during a speeds test.
I have fiber to the home with 100 up 100 down it's awesome I'm one person :)
I doubt netflix 4k is as high as 25Mbits/s more like 1/2 that at average.
Feel bad? My max speed iz 5.5 kilobits per second
75MB Comcast business. All day
50-100 Mbs
50/12 is ok for most users.
I agree. I did a test and streamed 5 tvs simultaneously and used about 50 mbps. For home use, no one needs 1 Gbe internet.