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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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
To me in Michigan, I also find those rates horrifyingly terrible, expensive, and inexplicably capped.
But here we have a few options for ISPs. In places where they don’t really compete with each other, you can get absurdly terrible plans. And it’s perfectly legal because fuck you, consumer, that’s why.
More like America - Fuck you for living here, bruh. Deal with it.
In my neighborhood AT&T is offering gigabit fiber-to-the-house for $80/month, IIRC. Been meaning to switch to it, actually.
Edit: my point being, as long as they aren’t colluding to not compete with one another, you can get much better rates.
What will it take for people to burn down all corporate offices?
I dunno, Fight Club?
I thought I was overpaying for my 1500Mbps at £75
Thank you EU for your many blessings.
EU ? £ ? Didn’t you guys leave ?
You can take the UK out of the EU but you can't take the EU out of the UK
lol now comes australia: $109 for 100/40, and that’s a good deal because our conservative government fucked everything and pissed away $40bn
You have data caps in the US???? I pay 40 euros a month for a 2Gb/s connection in France with no data cap.
40 euros! Paying just 30€ for 10Gb/s in Portugal..
80$ 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 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.
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
I have 800/300, no caps, for like 30€/month. Those prices are insane.
I pay that much for 6/0.512
I'm not sure what to say....that really sucks.
You guys get more than 1MB/s?
You guys get less than a gigabit?
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'm betting $100 on you running back to your ISP's nearest office to extend your plan within a week.
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.
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.
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.
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
5G fixed wireless is the way. I could pay Cox $120/mo for a 500Mbps cable line with a data cap, or I could pay Verizon $60/mo for 5G and get 1200Mbps with no BS fake data cap.
5G home internet is cheap because not a lot of people have it yet. Jump on the train now OP before it gets more expensive.
The only catch is that you have to make sure you have good line-of-sight to the tower before you order. That's the key to getting good speeds. Look out your windows and try to find some 5G antennas. In my neighborhood they're installed on the light poles.
That said, even if you can only get LTE service, chances are it'll still be cheaper and faster than the competition in your area. So it still might be worth it to look into it.
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'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 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.