Me too. I tell everyone who will listen that they should look at their actual bandwidth usage. I've looked at the detailed statistics on my Google Nest WiFi router, and my family's peak usage never exceeded about 30 Mbps. That's with me working from home as a CS PhD student and my wife homeschooling our kids during the day. I have 300 Mbps (down) because that's the lowest, cheapest tier that my ISP offers.
Maybe people are actually using their 1 Gbps bandwidth if they have multiple 4K TVs and do serious gaming? I don't know, I doubt it.
I tell everyone to look at their actual cellular data usage too. I think all middle class Americans just buy unlimited plans now, but I do just fine with 500 MB per month for $5.
Netflix 4K streams seem to top out around 25Mbps and I'd guess other services are comparable, so 1Gbps is still a lot of bandwidth for even large multi-streamer households. I think a lot of families will reach the limits of cheap, basic wifi routers before they start actually pushing against their bandwidth caps in these situations.
My issue in the past with cable gigabit service was the relatively tiny upstream bandwidth of 20-50Mbps. This made for some challenges a few years ago when suddenly everybody in the house was on Zoom all day long.
I strongly agree about upload bandwidth. In previous homes I've chosen higher tiers of service for exactly that reason. I think I could live happily with 20 or even 10 Mpbs down, but not 1 Mbps up when I'm using cloud storage for photos and need to be on some video calls. I shouldn't need to pay for an order-of-magnitude more download bandwidth to get reasonable upload bandwidth, but apparently I do.
> Me too. I tell everyone who will listen that they should look at their actual bandwidth usage.
I shouldn't have to look at my actual bandwidth usage. As I wrote in a different comment [1]:
> You are unknowingly accepting being ripped off. It's not reasonable for big ISPs like Comcast to offer me 300 megabits download 15 megabits upload for $70 a month (might've been $90, but assume $70) while EPB of Chattanooga [1] offers 1 gigabit symmetrical for $67.99 a month. What speed any individual actually needs doesn't have to come into the picture. In matters of consumer protection, the principle of the thing matters just as much as actual consumer needs.
> Today's internet technology (particularly optical fiber [2], paired with hardware implementing DOCSIS 3.1 or 4 [3]) is fully capable of providing 1 gigabit symmetrical for "the majority of people", even in rural areas. Moreover, in the long term, transitioning to fiber would be less expensive to the big ISPs like Comcast [4], but Comcast keeps raising prices on broadband over decades-old copper wires and committing subsidy fraud [5]. Don't let big ISPs define "good enough" to be much lower than technology and the price of the technology allow.
(The [] citations within my quotes refer to links in my other comment. I'm leaving them in for Ctrl-F purposes.)
Sure. I just mean, from a home economics perspective, that people should look at their actual bandwidth usage rather than blindly paying for 500 Mbps or 1 Gbps because they just want a fast connection and that's what the ISP marketing literature recommends for a family of four.
What do you do with all that, especially with WiFi everywhere? Are you continuously streaming video while on-the-go between WiFi networks? That's fine, it's just stunning.
I'm admittedly a minimal user of my phone. I average about 10 unlocks per day. Especially when I'm on-the-go, it's just calls and text messages, some driving directions, and maybe looking up a phone number or business hours. If I use it to listen to an audiobook or podcast, I download those ahead of time on WiFi. Using only 200 MB per month is normal.
I don't actually like connecting to public WiFi spots. Ususally the connection is worse than my cellular and why send data through yet another third party network? At least I have a long established relationship with my service provider.
Continuously streaming video? Not at all, might watch something here or there but most of my device usage is text or just reading. I barely use the phone or texting or social media.
I think we forget just how data-hungry modern apps are. A 1080p "Full-HD" YouTube video will consume 4GB/hour of watch time. Even going down to 480p is still 1GB/hour.
True. I really try to avoid using the browser for anything unless I'm on WiFi because a single page (really all the other crap that gets loaded besides the actual content that I'm looking for, even with uBlock Origin) might eat dozens of MB. For a while I used the NPR One app to stream podcasts, but I gave it up when it started using way, way more data than streaming audio should ever require.
Nice! I have a few days in the past month with only 1-2 unlocks, but those are outliers. At a minimum, my wife and I will exchange a couple messages per hour when I'm out of the house. I like to think that I could live as a total weirdo without a phone (just my Google Voice line from my laptop) if I were single.
not OP, but anyone who streams music regularly or watches videos on their commute, or does video calls on the go, will rack up pretty serious gigs. I'm with you on low bandwidth usage and certainly on the home bandwidth thing, but some people have a very mobile and streaming-centric lifestyle. It's a bit foreign to me but it's definitely common.
Maybe people are actually using their 1 Gbps bandwidth if they have multiple 4K TVs and do serious gaming? I don't know, I doubt it.
I tell everyone to look at their actual cellular data usage too. I think all middle class Americans just buy unlimited plans now, but I do just fine with 500 MB per month for $5.