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'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.

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 thought I was overpaying for my 1500Mbps at £75

Thank you EU for your many blessings.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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'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.

It depends… you say several times “I”. So yeah if it is just you, 55 is likely fine.

If you are the only one, watching something, then yeah likely you’ll be fine

A single 1080p Netflix stream will consume about 4Mbps.

If you just stream music and media and browse the net, that's an easy way to benchmark. If you're gaming, higher speeds will not increase performance of online gaming - this requires quite little and depends more on latency (satellite/star link vs cable/fiber etc). The higher speeds will only help with more concurrent users or game/media downloads (if you pirate media, for example).

I'm not an expert but I think you should be fine on the lower one. My understanding is that most plans wildly overemphasize what you need for an activity. Like they'll say the most expensive one is for gaming but in reality the cheap one would work completely fine for a single person.

I used to have 55mbps and I never had any issues. You won't be downloading huge games in minutes but just plan ahead and you'll be fine.

55mbps down will be enough when lower cost is most important. it's about the download speed we have at the office (55mbps), and at home too (faster but network gear is slower than the pipe coming in, so 55-60mbps is what i get on the main pc).

we can have a remote desktop going with multimedia coming through that (for work; low bitrate but latency matters), 2-3 hd streams, a couple screens on web sites, something downloading a huge batch of updates, an online 'shooter' game being played, and still not worry about loading up something else to use some more.

for straight downloads from servers and cdn that can handle it, expect 2-4 minutes for a typical linux iso download, and for big downloads about 25 gigabytes per hour max.

You'll be fine on 55mbps. That's what I was on for the last decade in Denver. Has no issues with bandwidth in my household.

hoping to start a community intranet as the internet sucks and is shit nowadays

I started on a 50Mbps plan which was a massive upgrade from what Comcast offered at the time, so I was pretty pleased with that. At one point I noticed something dragging down my connection, and found signs of people attacking my servers. That was easily dealt with, however what surprised me was the speed of the traffic I was seeing. After blocking the attack I pushed up my torrents and realized I had been upgraded to a 100Mbps connection and didn't realize it (I really do love my local provider!).

So yeah, for general web browsing you probably won't notice any difference between those two speeds. If you are downloading specific content then of course the downgrade will take twice as long, and as others mentioned it shouldn't affect your streaming speeds at all.

I don’t think it’s necessarily horrible but with slow WAN speeds it might be worth it to set up a DNS caching server and potentially caching proxies for whatever services you use (this used to be easier for generic HTTP before encryption).

For example, macOS has Content Caching for caching Apple software updates. You can also cache repositories for several Linux distributions, Docker, stuff like that too.