If you’re an online gamer, checking sites like Lag Report can give you a better idea as to whether your internet connection is sufficient for gaming. Therefore, stats like latency, packet loss, and jitter are more important in this context, but these factors vary on a day-to-day basis, if not minute to minute. Online multiplayer games like Call of Duty, Fortnite, and League of Legends need throughput of 5 Mbps to 50 Mbps, but online games rarely send large packets of data instead, they send smaller packets of data very quickly. Even if you have several household members, you’re probably fine with a plan offering 100 Mbps to 500 Mbps for watching TV or movies on the internet. Streaming 1080p HD videos like those on Sling TV or YouTube TV and from most broadcast services requires around 3 Mbps to 5 Mbps each. ![]() Gigabit-level service provides speeds around 900 megabits per second, so an extended family (up to 12 people) could stream 4K content to each of their own devices at the same time and still stay under that limit. Streaming video in 4K requires only about 25 Mbps per stream, according to Disney+. (Note that the gigs we’re talking about here are gigabits per second, or Gbps, not to be confused with gigabytes, or GB, which are commonly used to measure memory and storage capacity in PCs and SSDs.) Is gigabit internet service really necessary in 2023?Īlthough faster sounds better, you shouldn’t sign up for a gigabit internet tier before figuring out how you use the internet and whether faster speeds would actually help you with work or play. Multi-gig plans: Expensive and rare, these plans allow you to download anything at speeds above 2,000 Mbps (2 Gbps) and theoretically up to 10 Gbps. They’re not available everywhere, but internet service providers are starting to push them more. ![]() Gig+ plans: Such plans deliver download speeds between 1,200 Mbps and 2,000 Mbps. Until this year, ISPs focused on selling gigabit plans, but now they are heavily promoting gig+ and multi-gig plans. Gigabit internet plans: These promise download speeds of around 800 Mbps to 940 Mbps and upload speeds of either 30 Mbps to 50 Mbps (cable) or 880 Mbps to 940 Mbps (fiber). Areas limited to DSL service see download speeds at or under 100 Mbps. Plans with slower speeds were common a few years back, and though you can find some affordable connectivity plans offering speeds as low as 50 Mbps at the moment, in early 2023, most current entry-level plans offer speeds of 75 Mbps to 300 Mbps. This is the low end for any broadband internet service, whether it’s fiber, cable, DSL, or wireless 5G home service. High-speed internet service: This term technically refers to anything at or above 25 Mbps, according to the FCC’s increasingly outdated definition. Here’s how internet speed tiers typically break down: That means you don’t always see the ultrafast speeds you might expect. As with most advertised internet speeds, gigabit internet services advertise and deliver up to 1 gigabit per second, or 1,000 megabits per second. What is gigabit internet? Gig+? Multi-gig? ![]() Services such as Disney+, Netflix, Sony PlayStation Plus, and Zoom are aware of internet speed limitations and have designed their offerings to work with much slower speeds, though you may still want a plan with speeds of 100 Mbps to 500 Mbps if you want to support streaming from multiple devices throughout the day.īut first we’ll dive into what gigabit internet entails, why you might be tempted to sign up for a high-speed plan, and why you don’t really need one. Every internet service provider wants you to sign up for its faster gigabit service, but upgrading to that tier can cost as much as 78% to 80% over the lowest (or “slowest”) tier.Īccording to Ookla’s Speedtest, 195 megabits per second is the median fixed broadband speed in the US as of January 2023, which means many households enjoy speeds above that, and many have speeds below that. In fact, some entry-level and most midtier internet plans are fine for most people-even if you work from home and collaborate on Zoom all day, or if you relax at night by streaming 4K movies while your kids stream music and videos. Upgrading to gigabit sounds tempting: After all, faster speeds are always better, right? You’ve probably seen ads for gigabit internet service promising blazing-fast speeds that will eliminate lag when you’re playing games online and let you upload files in seconds.
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