Quote:
Originally Posted by 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.
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I agree with you on the backups. After the first full backup, the rest are incremental and not a problem. The problem is with the first full backup or if you want to run another full backup periodically or if you have multiple computers which we do. When I had cable, my upload speed was about 30Mbs and I couldn't get the full backup to complete.
As far as 40Mbs being sufficient, that could be true if you had fiber internet and were getting that speed all the time and were hard wired to your router. But as we know, even with fiber, forget about cable, the internet is variable so you need some extra speed as a buffer or you could have problems. When I help Villagers switch to Fiber Internet, I hear the same story often. That they needed to pay for higher cable internet speeds because when the snow birds returned their cable internet speed would vary enough to cause their streaming devices to buffer and were tired of slow internet when using their computers. The other thing that is often overlooked is for example, say you have 100Mbs service at your router. When you are hard wired or very close to your wifi device you will get this speed. But when you are on Wifi, as you move away from your wifi device, your speed will get slower and slower. Many of us have TVs, computers and other devices on Wifi because we can hard wire them. So having 40Mbs service in theory, if you are wired can be enough bandwidth as you mentioned, but in reality, most use wifi for almost everything so 40Mbs will not be enough speed. This is why I believe most ISPs give you a minimum of 200-500Mbs. They want to service to work for most people and don't wan the call backs. Just not worth it for them.
You make a good point though, ISPs are using speed as an advertising gimmick to some extent. Even if they offered you 1Gbs speed, you would probably never use all that bandwidth. If you are not using the bandwidth it doesn't cost them anymore to provide 1Gbs service vs 500Gbs service. Where speed and number of users comes into play is with Fixed wireless from Verizon and T-Moble and with cable. In all these cases, their transport system is designed to handle only a certain amount of users simultaneously. When this is exceeded you can experience slow-downs.