[biker1]

The majority of Villages would be fine with a nominal 40 megabits per second up and down. It is disingenuous on the part of vendors to suggest that hundreds of megabits per second to gigabits per second will provide you a better experience. Those who actually need higher bandwidths will generally know. Regarding backups to the cloud, they are typically incremental backups and don't require much bandwidth and it really doesn't matter how long they take. If you have no clue what you need then you are probably paying for much more than you need.

Originally Posted by jrref

Technically, you are 100% correct, but there is more than streaming that requires higher speeds. For example, if you have cameras or a video doorbell, when someone comes to the door or the camera senses movement, the video has to go from your home to the server in the cloud then back down to your device. Slow cable upload speeds or slower speeds in general make the response time very slow. When I had cable and my video doorbell rang, the person was gone most of the time before I got the video. Another example it if you backup your devices to the cloud which you should be doing. Or if you upload a lot of files or pictures. Then upload speed becomes an issue.

So all this said, Most of us Villagers will get by fine anywhere from 200-500 mbs. Remember, with cable you will get slow-downs from time to time which will cause some buffering so you want a higher speed than 100Mbs to give you some margin when this happens.

If you are a gamer, then higher speeds and shorter latency is what you will want. I'm not sure how many "gamers" there are in the Villages but this is a driver for faster speeds.

These high internet speeds are mainly for homes with families where you have three or more people using the internet or if you have a business at home or you are a Youtuber or upload a lot of content to the internet.

At the end of the day, $40 for 300Mbs or $50 for $500Mbs or if you were lucky and got the $35 for 1Gbs that was available recently these services are what you want. If you have fiber at your home, you want that service because the download and upload speeds are the same, you are NOT sharing your bandwidth with all your neighbors meaning you have a direct connection so no slow-downs during peak times and the latency is the shortest. Always choose fiber over cable at any price.