Internet service providers (ISPs) don’t make it easy to understand how much internet speed you need for streaming and other activities. Non-standard measurements, vague language, and inconsistent metrics all contribute to confusion. This makes it easy to overpay for speed you aren’t using.
When reviewing my ISP’s latest offers, I was struck by how they were overkill for most people. As with so many sales techniques, you don’t need as much as they’re trying to sell you.
A review of internet speed
Home internet plans mostly come down to two numbers: download speed and upload speed. As the name says, these represent how quickly data moves “down” from the internet to your computer, and back “up” to the internet from your machine. You can check these with an online speed test.
Internet speeds are measured in bits per second, which contrasts with file measurements being in bytes. As there are 8 bits in 1 byte, dividing the stated network speed by 8 gives you a clearer estimate of how long file transfers will take. For example, with a download speed of 200Mbps (equivalent to 25MB/s), an 800MB file will take around 32 seconds to download.
It’s easy to calculate how much speed you need for downloading files, but it becomes murkier when you consider streaming, online gaming, multiple people getting online at once, and other complex cases. This is where many people sign up for more speed than they need.
The speed they try to sell you
When you visit Comcast Xfinity’s featured deals page for my area, these are the offers you get (as a new customer):
The minimum speed is 300Mbps, for which the Broadband Facts label says the typical download speed is 352Mbps, upload speed is 117Mbps, and latency is 15ms. The 500Mbps and 1Gbps plans promise the same upload speeds and latency.
The label on 300Mbps is what drove me to discuss this further: “good for catching up on your email and streaming” is a huge understatement. You could check your email on an ultra-slow 5Mbps connection without much trouble.
Streaming companies publish recommended speeds for their services, which aren’t as high as you might think. Netflix’s recommended speed page states 5Mbps for 1080p streaming and 15Mbps for 4K streams. HBO Max recommends 10-15Mbps for 1080p and 25-50Mbps for 4K streams.
That means even if four people in your home were streaming 4K movies simultaneously, you’d have bandwidth to spare on Xfinity’s lowest plan. Meanwhile, the 500Mbps plan label is also misleading—you don’t need that much speed to “video chat with ease”. Zoom and Google Meet both recommend around 4Mbps download speed for group calls.
Online gaming isn’t speed-dependent
Comcast’s tiers don’t even mention gaming until you get to 1Gbps, which can fool you into thinking you need those high speeds to play online. It’s a common misconception that higher speed gives you a better online gaming performance, but this isn’t true.
The main area where you’ll appreciate faster network speeds is when downloading games and updates. Modern titles can easily reach 100GB, and (frequent) updates can be 10GB+. Automatic update options can help, but these aren’t perfect, and it’s no fun to be stuck on a download when your friends are ready to play.
Otherwise, online games require a small amount of bandwidth—you could likely get away with as low as 10Mbps. 50Mbps, and certainly above 100Mbps, is plenty of speed for games. What’s more important for gaming is the stability of your connection and latency to the server.
How ping affects gaming
Ping is a measure of latency; it’s the number of milliseconds it takes for data to travel from your device to the remote server, and then back to the device. Lower ping is better because there’s less of a delay between you taking an action and it happening in the game.
Under 100ms ping is playable for most games. Less than 50ms is good, and under 25ms is excellent. Your distance from the game’s servers plays a big part in this.
Ping is not dependent on your network speed, aside from a congested network resulting in higher latency. If you’re trying to play a game while others on your network are performing heavy actions like downloading huge files, you’ll need more speed to handle it all at once.
Otherwise, a stable connection will benefit online games more than speed will. You should connect your console or PC to your router via Ethernet instead of Wi-Fi, since a wired connection is far more stable. It’s also a good idea to use the QoS options on your router to prioritize games.
More speed is only for convenience, after a point
Once you’ve passed a baseline level of speed to support everyone in your house’s normal usage, adding more speed has diminishing returns. As with games, you’ll mostly notice it when you’re downloading large files.
But for most people, this is a rare occasion. In the last five years, my download speed has gone from 200Mbps to 1Gbps (for reasons I explained when considering Mint Mobile’s home internet plan). Aside from game updates, I haven’t felt a noticeable difference as this has increased. I rarely download files above 1GB; an OS ISO for a new virtual machine is the occasional exception. I appreciate having a 1Gbps connection (and I save money on it because of how Xfinity works), but it’s overkill even for me as a tech writer who works from home and is hugely into games.
If you’re in a similar position, it’s not worth paying way more every month to speed up occasional downloads. At 300Mbps, a 3GB file takes 80 seconds to download. At 500Mbps, the same file will download in 48 seconds. Either way, it will finish in the time it takes to grab a drink—hardly worth paying $15/month extra for.
As I mentioned with gaming, you’ll see a more noticeable boost by upgrading your in-home setup, rather than the speed from your ISP. You won’t get the promised speed on Wi-Fi; it’s worth connecting via Ethernet on any devices you frequently use. Be sure you aren’t making speed test mistakes, either.
Upgrading your router (perhaps to a mesh Wi-Fi system) to improve signal strength will help you get closer to the stated speeds across your home. And every router has tricks to help improve your connection speed.
Though there are special use cases
In certain scenarios, higher speed is worth the cost. I’ve focused on download speeds, since most people download much more than they upload. Plus, with cable plans (including the Xfinity example), paying more rarely gets you a faster upload speed.
But if you’re a streamer, a strong upload speed is important for a steady connection. The same goes if you regularly upload massive videos or other files—you don’t want to wait a full day for uploads to finish.
If you host servers in your home, have downloads or uploads running all day, regularly download huge files, or have multiple people working from home, you might require more speed. You likely know if you’re such a person, which is why the marketing language from Xfinity frustrates me.
For an average family, and certainly a couple or single person, 300Mbps is plenty. My biggest problem with home internet plans is that the baseline price is so high, plus they constantly raise the cost after hooking you with an introductory offer. But that’s a discussion for another day.
Finally, I’d recommend that everyone switch to a fiber internet provider if possible. Fiber is more efficient than cable connections, which is why its upload speeds match download speeds (while cable has much lower upload speeds). Fiber connections also tend to have lower ping for this reason.