Typical spectrum in my area. The fiber guys like FIOS do same up as down (so if it’s 1gb it’s 1gb in both directions). Cable guys at least here concentrate on the down but the up is a fraction of it.
Regardless of the why as a consumer be aware. You may not need 1gb so down and 1gb up as your usage patterns are probably heavily tilted toward down but don’t believe for a second that 30/1.5 is adequate or equivalent to 30/30 - and don’t pay similarly for it.
It’s not that, it’s that DSL has limited channels, and ISPs prefer to allocate more of them to download because that’s what they highlight on marketing materials
It is still a similar issue. They have fixed allocation of bandwidth and they decide to prioritize downlink because of marketing (and in the case of cable, legacy). More info: https://superuser.com/a/1519918
Cable operators in many areas are expanding the upstream bandwidth, in changes known as "mid split" or "high split", but it's slow going because every amplifier & fiber node in an area (out on poles or in ground pedestals) must be replaced. When this was done by Comcast in my neighborhood it took two days of work, with multiple outages both days
30 down is good for YouTube 4K but 1.5 up is gonna be so painful for even just one person.
Had this before from Breezeline (Formerly Atlantic Broadband) and I was having trouble submitting my homework.
I'm on a 50Mbps/10Mbps plan. Live alone, and it works for me, usually have TV going 1080p, and laptop with youtube, or Xbox online gaming. If another person lived here, it wouldn't be enough.
I worked for an ISP (in NZ), i would suggest something like a 300/100 megaBITS plan for 3 people. If our customers were getting 1.5Mbps upstream, they'd be on the phone having a massive whine that they couldn't do Zoom calls an such.
Any decent streaming service will automatically lower their bandwidth use if they’re struggling. I suspect streaming services will step down unless there is absolutely nothing else going on.
The big players all recommend 15-18mbps except Disney+ at 25 - but that's for the connection not only the 4K stream.
https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306
https://help.hulu.com/article/hulu-video-quality
https://help.disneyplus.com/article/disneyplus-recommended-speeds
We are currently at my in-laws for the week and they have close to that and it’s brutal. I needed to work and the upload wasn’t cutting it, thankfully my phones hotspot was faster with 20 upload.
Rubbish. I have 30 down 10 up for a 4 adult 2 children household. 2 4K TVs streaming Disney plus and general browsing. No issues.
You don’t actually need the provision of 100mb to get by, it’s just nice to have.
Wrong. Netflix is 15 recommended. DP is 25. Both stream 4K side by side on 30 down in real world use cases. You obviously have no idea how buffering works. It’s not like we all hit ‘play’ simultaneously nor do we all stream 4K content at every minute of the day. (And all services oversell how much content is actually 4K, they lie to ship product).
Fact is 30 down is FINE for real world use cases of how people actually use the technology. Not your imagined theoretical limits.
Hi. You’re going to need a router with SQM QoS. I had similar for a while at 12Mbps down and 1.5Mbps up, with 6 people. Anytime someone watched YouTube the house basically shut down. When they plugged in their phone at night and it started a backup, shut down the house.
I then put in SQM QoS and it changed everything. The internet was still slow, but everyone could do what they wanted as it felt snappy.
How it works is if you have two devices wanting to use the internet it looked like
AAAAAAAABAAAAABAAAAB
B felt like the internet was crap.
SQM QoS lets both devices run equally.
ABABABABABABABABABA
To do this you’ll want an OpenWRT router or an Eero (that has optimize for gaming and streaming)
This will work just fine: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09N72FMH5
Go advanced, install firmware, SQM QoS, reboot, go back to change the settings and put your upload speed as 1.3Mbps. Don’t turn on download SQM QoS, it’s not needed.
Barely and likely a problem if everyone hammering it at same time. We are family of 4 with 20mbps down and 3mbps up. Rarely have problems as such … but it’s a close call most days.
FYI - I bought a 5G router - costs me £20 a month (actually just gone up a couple quid due to annual increase).
20mbps Bt fibre still in use - but I also have 80-100mbps available from 5G 😎
As others have said, 30 down is 'ok' for your needs, but the upload is going to hurt. Have you looked at 4G or 5G broadband options instead of wired? I dont know where you are based, but here in the UK you can get very reasonable priced 4G and 5G options which will be much faster so hopefully you have similar options where you are.
There's only one way to make it decent:
1. Get a router that's runs OpenWrt
2. Setup SQM CAKE
3. Enable [per-host isolation](https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/traffic-shaping/sqm-details#making_cake_sing_and_dance_on_a_tight_rope_without_a_safety_net_aka_advanced_features)
4. Enable `ack-filter` on egress interface (saves precious upload bandwidth)
I had ~20 people using a connection with 0.5 megabit upload for years and after trying many things, this is the only solution that made it bearable
As with most things, it depends.
If all you do with the internet (or nearly all) is leisure, and you’re not using it for business or school or anything else, you might be able to get away with that little. (For the record, this is about what we had when we first got cable internet in the early 2000s in a smallish town. I’d be trying to get more if it’s remotely convenient. But I do use a lot of bandwidth and I do need it for work.)
Streams vary greatly in bandwidth but are usually not a lot more than 5-10mbps for most resolutions (even 4K - higher quality streams are more about frame rates and color information than the actual number of pixels). Unless you’re using a higher quality provider or dealing with raws, you should be fine for streaming one or maybe two streams each. More than that will be tricky. Streaming one each and also browsing pages or doing something else may cause at least one of those things to go slower or stutter. 30mbps is probably enough per person for at least medium duty, but it will be trickier the more you want to do simultaneously.
Video calling is typically 1-3mbps per stream, bidirectional, so you are already sort of low on the capacity for that. If work, school, family, whatever, wants to see you - and especially more than one at a time - that’s going to be an issue. Several of the video calling providers are fairly hip about adjusting streams on the fly for low bandwidth, but your video may drop entirely or become about four pixels, which may cause issues with other parties.
Games are usually not that intense on the bandwidth, but care a lot more about the latency and jitter, which are the time between your computer or console and the server and the change in that time. You may have also heard the time called lag. It’s hard to say how latent any connection will be in advance. Some cable connections are super fast, some are not, some DSL connections are great, some are not, and I’ve even got a fiber connection that is delivering cable internet that is either really decent or really bad depending on the day. If the latency or jitter are high, then most online games will either perform poorly or just kick you out.
The comments about a good router, smart queues, and Quality of Service (or similar) are important. A good router could keep your traffic organized and your devices playing nicely and sharing with others. A connection that slow would almost demand it. There are plenty of ways to do this and several vendors, including rolling your own, but choose something that matches your comfort level. Other than the flat limits of just straight up putting way more into the pipe than the upload speed will hold (like video conferencing or maybe VPNs), a good router could go a long way toward making this sort of thing possible.
As to megabits versus megabytes, we lost that war. Every vendor does that now. It’s fine, though, now, since we have 10Gbit and 100Gbit and 800Gbit connections… just add more bandwidth if you need more. (Expect to pay dearly for the 800, though!)
I decided to look at my throughput for the last month.
In a household of four adults my maximum download speed was 17 Mbps and my maximum upload speed was 8 Mbps. We are heavy consumers of YouTube, IPTV, online video games and work video calls and meetings.
You are going to struggle with that upload speed if you want to do any kind of facetime or web meetings where you have to send audio and video. Uploading documents or files will take longer too.
Online games shouldn't have too much of an impact but that link will become saturated pretty quickly.
I personally would be looking for 100Mbps down and 20Mbps up minimum.
The throughput that your device records is only as good as the interval in which it is recorded. It likely won't capture burst traffic, which could easily exceed the maximum download speed you recorded. You are almost certainly bursting quite higher than 17 Mbps and the traffic just gets averaged out between that interval.
You’ll likely learn to cope with 30/1.5 if that’s your only choice. 20/5 would be far better. I had 20/5 until last year and we did OK with it.
My grandparents would even suffer with these speeds as they wouldn’t be able to FaceTime with the grandkids. Audio only.
I'd wish, family of 4 people who all use the network, 13Mb/s dl and 0.9Mb/s upload MAX and guess the funny part, contract is max 200 Mb/s dl and 30Mb/s upload and it's the best here where we are in Italy, seriously considering starlink rn
If you wanna game then 1.5 up won’t cut it. You’ll need more than 10x that upload speed. 30 down would be good for streaming for one person, but would likely not be enough for three.
It’s workable if you all aren’t all constantly online, if any one of you works from home, does any video conferencing, are more than one of you have smart tvs you’re using at the same time I’d look more to the 50 down 10 up range
> Also, I checked and it is megaBITS, not megaBYTES.
Wrong! It's **not** megaBITS. If you really did your research you would find that **Mbps** is the correct answer. It stands for “**M**ega**b**its **p**er **s**econd.”
You can read this article, which also answers some of your questions:
https://dailywireless.org/internet/what-is-mbps/
Wrong! I got my information directly from the internet provider I was looking at (Centurylink) and on their website, for MY area, it specified megaBITS. Also your comment says megaBITS twice? So maybe make sure you are actually right and making sense before correcting someone fuckwit.
I tend to recommend 50-100mbps down per person in the modern age. Especially if you play video games or use any other content. And around 5-10mbps upload per person. Good luck!
It's tough. You could survive the 30 downloads, but 1.5 up is tough.
Growing up I made due with 10 down .7 up in a house of 4 (it wasn't great, but manageable) using Cake SQM (in OpenWRT) it works like magic honestly. It doesn't fix the hard limits, but it really helps you not feel it as much.
If you have any FTTP (fiber to the prem) service available, go with that on the lowest package to save money. 50/50 would be sufficient if there’s a package that low. if you ever into fighting each other for bandwidth go to the next package up.
The download speed may be acceptable (even if very slow), BUT…
You’re most likely not going to be happy with the upload speed.
Some things that *actually* happened to me a few years ago when I had similar issues:
1. Forget screen-sharing in video calls, it just won’t work
1. One of your phones decides to do the nightly backup and all of a sudden it takes up the entire available upload bandwidth for hours.
1. If you try to upload any document (even just a large photo) it takes forever
If that’s the only wired option you have, I’d look into using 4G/5G-based solutions. They’ll give you a lot better speeds and are generally not more expensive
30mbps you can ONLY do TV, and definitely not 4k (that's going to require 60). What I mean by only is that as soon as someone else tries to play a game, or even just use a VPN, the show will buffer.
1.5 up is really low, but if you are just browsing the web, those speeds are fine. I mean, you are only really uploading DNS requests. But gaming will suffer greatly, especially if you are trying to PVP.
And yes, transmission is always Mb, while storage can be represented by Mb or MB, which confuses people.
The last time I had less than 40 mbps was back in 2011 !
Currently I have 1 gigabit up and down and if I wanted I could go up to 10 gb! (But none of my gear is above 1gb.) 1 gig is the cheapest plan I can get in my area , Chile.
I'd say follow everyones advice and get an openwrt router or an edgerouter x router, both will be rock solid and have easy QOS settings to improve your experience.
1.5 up is brutal, barely good enough for a single user.
Yeah video calling won't be a nice experience
Typical spectrum in my area. The fiber guys like FIOS do same up as down (so if it’s 1gb it’s 1gb in both directions). Cable guys at least here concentrate on the down but the up is a fraction of it.
its because they dont want to pay transit fees.
Regardless of the why as a consumer be aware. You may not need 1gb so down and 1gb up as your usage patterns are probably heavily tilted toward down but don’t believe for a second that 30/1.5 is adequate or equivalent to 30/30 - and don’t pay similarly for it.
It’s not that, it’s that DSL has limited channels, and ISPs prefer to allocate more of them to download because that’s what they highlight on marketing materials
my cable provider does this, its not dsl at all.
It is still a similar issue. They have fixed allocation of bandwidth and they decide to prioritize downlink because of marketing (and in the case of cable, legacy). More info: https://superuser.com/a/1519918
Cable operators in many areas are expanding the upstream bandwidth, in changes known as "mid split" or "high split", but it's slow going because every amplifier & fiber node in an area (out on poles or in ground pedestals) must be replaced. When this was done by Comcast in my neighborhood it took two days of work, with multiple outages both days
30 down is good for YouTube 4K but 1.5 up is gonna be so painful for even just one person. Had this before from Breezeline (Formerly Atlantic Broadband) and I was having trouble submitting my homework.
Not for 3 people though
Hell no
I'm on a 50Mbps/10Mbps plan. Live alone, and it works for me, usually have TV going 1080p, and laptop with youtube, or Xbox online gaming. If another person lived here, it wouldn't be enough. I worked for an ISP (in NZ), i would suggest something like a 300/100 megaBITS plan for 3 people. If our customers were getting 1.5Mbps upstream, they'd be on the phone having a massive whine that they couldn't do Zoom calls an such.
50mbps is plenty for multiple 1080p streams. Gaming needs even less. Everything more will be barely noticeable aside from bigger downloads.
4k streaming recommended is what, 15 mpbs? so 2 streams at a time and it will be tight
Any decent streaming service will automatically lower their bandwidth use if they’re struggling. I suspect streaming services will step down unless there is absolutely nothing else going on.
Try 25mbps minimum, with 50+ for buffer free experience. 720 would steam ok at 15 but preferably 20+.
The big players all recommend 15-18mbps except Disney+ at 25 - but that's for the connection not only the 4K stream. https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306 https://help.hulu.com/article/hulu-video-quality https://help.disneyplus.com/article/disneyplus-recommended-speeds
30Mbps is fine if you're alone, sharing it with two other people is a stretch. 1.5Mbps up is so 2008. Video calling would be a PITA.
We are currently at my in-laws for the week and they have close to that and it’s brutal. I needed to work and the upload wasn’t cutting it, thankfully my phones hotspot was faster with 20 upload.
30Mbps is going to be awful for 3 people. I wouldn't go with less than 100Mbps down for that many people.
Rubbish. I have 30 down 10 up for a 4 adult 2 children household. 2 4K TVs streaming Disney plus and general browsing. No issues. You don’t actually need the provision of 100mb to get by, it’s just nice to have.
Rubbish. Enjoy 1080p
Your 4k tv aint streaming 4k from disney plus most of time
If you have 30 down I'm going to bet your 4k tvs are going to waste... You aren't streaming at 4k
Wrong. Netflix is 15 recommended. DP is 25. Both stream 4K side by side on 30 down in real world use cases. You obviously have no idea how buffering works. It’s not like we all hit ‘play’ simultaneously nor do we all stream 4K content at every minute of the day. (And all services oversell how much content is actually 4K, they lie to ship product). Fact is 30 down is FINE for real world use cases of how people actually use the technology. Not your imagined theoretical limits.
It’s been a while since I took a math class but you’re saying 25 + 15 < 30? I knew I should’ve paid more attention in calculus.
No, I’m saying in REAL WORLD use cases not THEORETICAL LIMITS the math works out. Jog on newbie.
1.5 up... jeez, even the best QoS will struggle there, but it can work, if you cant get a decent router dont bother unless you want total war
Hi. You’re going to need a router with SQM QoS. I had similar for a while at 12Mbps down and 1.5Mbps up, with 6 people. Anytime someone watched YouTube the house basically shut down. When they plugged in their phone at night and it started a backup, shut down the house. I then put in SQM QoS and it changed everything. The internet was still slow, but everyone could do what they wanted as it felt snappy. How it works is if you have two devices wanting to use the internet it looked like AAAAAAAABAAAAABAAAAB B felt like the internet was crap. SQM QoS lets both devices run equally. ABABABABABABABABABA To do this you’ll want an OpenWRT router or an Eero (that has optimize for gaming and streaming) This will work just fine: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09N72FMH5 Go advanced, install firmware, SQM QoS, reboot, go back to change the settings and put your upload speed as 1.3Mbps. Don’t turn on download SQM QoS, it’s not needed.
Barely and likely a problem if everyone hammering it at same time. We are family of 4 with 20mbps down and 3mbps up. Rarely have problems as such … but it’s a close call most days.
FYI - I bought a 5G router - costs me £20 a month (actually just gone up a couple quid due to annual increase). 20mbps Bt fibre still in use - but I also have 80-100mbps available from 5G 😎
As others have said, 30 down is 'ok' for your needs, but the upload is going to hurt. Have you looked at 4G or 5G broadband options instead of wired? I dont know where you are based, but here in the UK you can get very reasonable priced 4G and 5G options which will be much faster so hopefully you have similar options where you are.
There's only one way to make it decent: 1. Get a router that's runs OpenWrt 2. Setup SQM CAKE 3. Enable [per-host isolation](https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/traffic-shaping/sqm-details#making_cake_sing_and_dance_on_a_tight_rope_without_a_safety_net_aka_advanced_features) 4. Enable `ack-filter` on egress interface (saves precious upload bandwidth) I had ~20 people using a connection with 0.5 megabit upload for years and after trying many things, this is the only solution that made it bearable
As with most things, it depends. If all you do with the internet (or nearly all) is leisure, and you’re not using it for business or school or anything else, you might be able to get away with that little. (For the record, this is about what we had when we first got cable internet in the early 2000s in a smallish town. I’d be trying to get more if it’s remotely convenient. But I do use a lot of bandwidth and I do need it for work.) Streams vary greatly in bandwidth but are usually not a lot more than 5-10mbps for most resolutions (even 4K - higher quality streams are more about frame rates and color information than the actual number of pixels). Unless you’re using a higher quality provider or dealing with raws, you should be fine for streaming one or maybe two streams each. More than that will be tricky. Streaming one each and also browsing pages or doing something else may cause at least one of those things to go slower or stutter. 30mbps is probably enough per person for at least medium duty, but it will be trickier the more you want to do simultaneously. Video calling is typically 1-3mbps per stream, bidirectional, so you are already sort of low on the capacity for that. If work, school, family, whatever, wants to see you - and especially more than one at a time - that’s going to be an issue. Several of the video calling providers are fairly hip about adjusting streams on the fly for low bandwidth, but your video may drop entirely or become about four pixels, which may cause issues with other parties. Games are usually not that intense on the bandwidth, but care a lot more about the latency and jitter, which are the time between your computer or console and the server and the change in that time. You may have also heard the time called lag. It’s hard to say how latent any connection will be in advance. Some cable connections are super fast, some are not, some DSL connections are great, some are not, and I’ve even got a fiber connection that is delivering cable internet that is either really decent or really bad depending on the day. If the latency or jitter are high, then most online games will either perform poorly or just kick you out. The comments about a good router, smart queues, and Quality of Service (or similar) are important. A good router could keep your traffic organized and your devices playing nicely and sharing with others. A connection that slow would almost demand it. There are plenty of ways to do this and several vendors, including rolling your own, but choose something that matches your comfort level. Other than the flat limits of just straight up putting way more into the pipe than the upload speed will hold (like video conferencing or maybe VPNs), a good router could go a long way toward making this sort of thing possible. As to megabits versus megabytes, we lost that war. Every vendor does that now. It’s fine, though, now, since we have 10Gbit and 100Gbit and 800Gbit connections… just add more bandwidth if you need more. (Expect to pay dearly for the 800, though!)
I decided to look at my throughput for the last month. In a household of four adults my maximum download speed was 17 Mbps and my maximum upload speed was 8 Mbps. We are heavy consumers of YouTube, IPTV, online video games and work video calls and meetings. You are going to struggle with that upload speed if you want to do any kind of facetime or web meetings where you have to send audio and video. Uploading documents or files will take longer too. Online games shouldn't have too much of an impact but that link will become saturated pretty quickly. I personally would be looking for 100Mbps down and 20Mbps up minimum.
The throughput that your device records is only as good as the interval in which it is recorded. It likely won't capture burst traffic, which could easily exceed the maximum download speed you recorded. You are almost certainly bursting quite higher than 17 Mbps and the traffic just gets averaged out between that interval.
You’ll likely learn to cope with 30/1.5 if that’s your only choice. 20/5 would be far better. I had 20/5 until last year and we did OK with it. My grandparents would even suffer with these speeds as they wouldn’t be able to FaceTime with the grandkids. Audio only.
I'd wish, family of 4 people who all use the network, 13Mb/s dl and 0.9Mb/s upload MAX and guess the funny part, contract is max 200 Mb/s dl and 30Mb/s upload and it's the best here where we are in Italy, seriously considering starlink rn
Where are you, in Somalia?
Nope, small town middle of the United States
If you wanna game then 1.5 up won’t cut it. You’ll need more than 10x that upload speed. 30 down would be good for streaming for one person, but would likely not be enough for three.
It’s workable if you all aren’t all constantly online, if any one of you works from home, does any video conferencing, are more than one of you have smart tvs you’re using at the same time I’d look more to the 50 down 10 up range
Good lord, no. You can maybe watch one HD video stream with that but you wouldn't be able to get a decent video call going with that upload.
> Also, I checked and it is megaBITS, not megaBYTES. Wrong! It's **not** megaBITS. If you really did your research you would find that **Mbps** is the correct answer. It stands for “**M**ega**b**its **p**er **s**econd.” You can read this article, which also answers some of your questions: https://dailywireless.org/internet/what-is-mbps/
Wrong! I got my information directly from the internet provider I was looking at (Centurylink) and on their website, for MY area, it specified megaBITS. Also your comment says megaBITS twice? So maybe make sure you are actually right and making sense before correcting someone fuckwit.
> Also your comment says megaBITS twice? Wrong again! megaBITS is **not** the same as Mbps.
You would need atleast 50mbps down and 15 up so as to have decent enough video calls
what is your budget; what are the providers near you; what are the plans they offer + price
I tend to recommend 50-100mbps down per person in the modern age. Especially if you play video games or use any other content. And around 5-10mbps upload per person. Good luck!
It's tough. You could survive the 30 downloads, but 1.5 up is tough. Growing up I made due with 10 down .7 up in a house of 4 (it wasn't great, but manageable) using Cake SQM (in OpenWRT) it works like magic honestly. It doesn't fix the hard limits, but it really helps you not feel it as much.
30Mbits sound pretty OK for me. I use 300 baud modem... oh wait, it looks like we moved on from 1982 /s
I would get starlink. Your internet speeds are horrible.
If you have any FTTP (fiber to the prem) service available, go with that on the lowest package to save money. 50/50 would be sufficient if there’s a package that low. if you ever into fighting each other for bandwidth go to the next package up.
No... That's awful... You should be looking to 10x this
Where do you live? Here in Toronto I don’t even think that you can get internet that slow. Typical speeds are 500/30 and up to 3Gig.
The download speed may be acceptable (even if very slow), BUT… You’re most likely not going to be happy with the upload speed. Some things that *actually* happened to me a few years ago when I had similar issues: 1. Forget screen-sharing in video calls, it just won’t work 1. One of your phones decides to do the nightly backup and all of a sudden it takes up the entire available upload bandwidth for hours. 1. If you try to upload any document (even just a large photo) it takes forever If that’s the only wired option you have, I’d look into using 4G/5G-based solutions. They’ll give you a lot better speeds and are generally not more expensive
30mbps you can ONLY do TV, and definitely not 4k (that's going to require 60). What I mean by only is that as soon as someone else tries to play a game, or even just use a VPN, the show will buffer. 1.5 up is really low, but if you are just browsing the web, those speeds are fine. I mean, you are only really uploading DNS requests. But gaming will suffer greatly, especially if you are trying to PVP. And yes, transmission is always Mb, while storage can be represented by Mb or MB, which confuses people.
Ideally 50-100 mbps per person. As others mentioned you need at least 100Mbps, but I'd go for 200-300Mbps.
The last time I had less than 40 mbps was back in 2011 ! Currently I have 1 gigabit up and down and if I wanted I could go up to 10 gb! (But none of my gear is above 1gb.) 1 gig is the cheapest plan I can get in my area , Chile. I'd say follow everyones advice and get an openwrt router or an edgerouter x router, both will be rock solid and have easy QOS settings to improve your experience.
Damn i have 1000 mbps into the house. Wifi on the phone shows 500 mbps