Why You Don’t Need 1000 Megabit Internet at Home
By: Alex Robinson
Tags: Internet Service Provider, Internet Speed, Internet Marketing, Internet Speed Test, Internet

Consumer technology is constantly advancing and this means more data-hungry applications and users who are ready to consume that data. To maintain a positive user experience with these applications, users should have fast, low latency internet to support them. But what is fast enough?

Mainstream internet providers like Spectrum, Xfinity, and Frontier like to flex their 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) plans. And they have successfully convinced most of the population that every household needs these speeds just because their two kids are gamers, they like to watch Netflix, and they have a new iPhone 13. This could not be further from the truth.

To better explain why, I’ll use an analogy.

Most homes today are equipped with 200 Amp power service. But, chances are you will never come close to overloading your main breaker. Let’s say you use about 1000 kWh per month. This equates to an average of 6 amps of sustained usage. Of course, there will be peaks while large appliances or air conditioning are in use, so it’s not unreasonable to say those peaks could be 10–15x your average usage. But, it’s still not close to 200 Amps.

According to Xfinity, the average customer downloads about 356 GB per month. If you’re using the internet for 12 hours per day, that is 2.16 Megabit per second (Mbps) of average sustained internet usage. That is less than 1% of the 1 Gbps plans being sold by popular providers. And even crazier, Frontier is offering 2 Gbps plans with the intention to roll out 10 Gbps at some point. But let’s say you’re not an “average” internet user. Even if you’re in the 95th percentile, you’re using about 13 Mbps average sustained download, which is still less than 2% of your available bandwidth.

I often hear “well, lots of people in our house watch Netflix and Disney+ at the same time, so we need 1 Gbps” as a counterargument.

Streaming HD from Netflix or Disney+ will use about 5 Mbps for each person streaming at a time. I doubt you have 200 people in your house all watching Disney+ on separate devices simultaneously… If you’re fancy and want to stream a 4K movie, that will use about 20–25 Mbps for each device streaming. That’s still enough for 40 people all streaming at the same time.

With that said, most users would be perfectly functional with somewhere between 15 and 100 Mbps internet, like the plans offered by Open Wireless.

We believe that the most important factor for a positive internet experience is low latency (aka “lag”). High latency means lag and feezing during Zoom calls, gaming, and other real-time apps. High latency will cause issues with these apps regardless of your download speed. This is why we optimize latency regardless of the package customers may select.

If you have 1 Gbps internet to your home and you’re still unhappy with your service, chances are it’s related to the wireless router you’re using. By using your own router or access points with your provided modem, you will often spread your Wi-Fi signal more efficiently throughout your home than you could with a Spectrum-provided router, for example. However, most users blame the service and fall for the ISP marketing trap, convincing them that they need more speed.

Of course, it’s nice to have a bandwidth “buffer” for situations when guests are visiting or if you have large file downloads and uploads. But, our advice is to invest in a higher quality router or mesh Wi-Fi system like Plume, offered by Open Wireless to all our customers.