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?)
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.
For context, my family of 5 has used 1.7TB/mo on average this year. That’s gaming, video and music streaming, and regular interneting. And all that without downloading large files most of the time, occasional OS updates withstanding for 10 always on devices. We’re on 500/500 fiber and it never skips a beat. Usually the bottleneck is the WiFi being on WiFi 6 or the server on the other end not being able to keep up (Netflix’s Tysons fight comes to mind). I haven’t seen the need to up it to 1G or 2.5G yet. This is with no enforced cap (we’re lucky enough to have competition on the backbone so it’s unlikely to be enforced). The OPs cap would absolutely be a no go in this setup. Not sure what the OP’s usage and needs are though.