Does it make any sense to get a gigabit Internet connection?

I have 80 Mb/s and it’s fantastic. Streaming shows is great, even when my niece is watching something else on her iPad.

Now that this is in IMHO (I was really more interested in the practicality of the speed and not looking for a recommendation), these are my options:

50M $55
100M $70
250M $90
1G $119

As I said above, it’s just me and my wife. During the holidays we might have 4 more adults but that will be a rare exception and not the rule. In theory, I guess we could both be streaming Netflix and on our phones at the same time. I have a google drive but don’t back up very much to it. I’m thinking either 50 or 100.

Since this is the future, we should not be surprised if an increasing number of providers simply don’t offer a minimum tier of service below 100 Mb/s @ (say) $25-50.

Meh, that isn’t super cheap and you sound like you don’t need over 50. If you’re rich, get the 100 because why not.

I am neither rich nor in the position that $180 a year will make a difference to me. I’d say I’m somewhere in the middle. I might just start off with 50 and upgrade if it becomes an issue or if I’m forced to.

As a side question, the ISP also offers cable TV. Does this typically eat up internet bandwidth or is it a separate circuit?

What are the data caps?

Your cable TV may or may not eat into your bandwidth, depending upon how they set it up. You’ll have to ask them. But 50M should be fine.

Not sure what I would do with Gigabit Internet. A larger data cap would be the main thing I need.

But I do love my Gigabit LAN. Wowzer. When you need the big file on/off the server now!

I hadn’t thought about data caps. They’ve never been an issue with my DSL. I don’t think I currently have one. Not surprisingly, the new ISP doesn’t mention them on their website.

As far as I know, actual cable TV is always considered separate. But they may also make it easy to watch Netflix and stuff on your TV. Usually that still counts against your Internet bandwidth.

Data caps are important. The fact that data caps do not scale with bandwidth has always seemed fishy to me. It’s like charging you more to get your water faster, but still only giving you a fixed number of gallons. It makes no sense.

For example, Comcast apparently still uses their 1 TB data cap even on their 1 gigabit connection. The same limit applies to their 10 megabit connection. The low end, with 10 megabits, would take 9.25 days of constant use at the maximum rate to hit the cap. That’s not too unreasonable. But it would take a little over 2 hours at max rate to hit your cap if you have 1Gbps connection. That’s insane.

Sure, as you go up, you’re less likely to use your full bandwidth at any time. But it gives you the idea. If you pay for that much bandwidth, you probably planned on using it. So why aren’t the caps staggered?

I have Google Fiber and love it. Everything possible is wired, and while I only rarely hit that full speed, it’s excellent to have it when needed.

Strangely, Google’s own services like YouTube don’t take advantage of the speed - I routinely upload long video files, and their servers are never much above 50 megabit.

If it’s Verizon FIOS, they don’t have hard data caps. If you use a truly astonishing amount of data every month, they may suspect you’re running a server and that’s probably not allowed if you have regular home service. So, they have soft data caps, but they are in the multi-terabyte range, and only if it’s very consistent.

Also with Verizon FIOS, cable service is separate from the data service. I’ve never seen any effect of having the TV on while streaming other stuff.

I don’t know about other ISPs.

As to your original question, it makes no sense to get a gigabit internet connection. I was looking into it myself and found a great article that had all the data usages for the various streaming and gaming services and realized I’d be wasting my money. Of course, I can’t find that article now.

HD Netflix uses about 3 GB per hour, for example, not every 8 seconds.