upload and download

born2ride

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I have been price shopping for internet and cable, I am at 100mbps with comcast and pay about 100 for internet and economy cable. Dish offer 10mbps with a cheap package, Comcast does offer lower ones. My question is when would i notice a difference in speed at 50,30,10?

We do torrents,netflixs ,youtube, I dont want any unhappy house hold member if i cut back!
 

lviperz

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It really depends on what you do and how many are sing the connection. You already said yo use it for some very big bandwidth hogs. If a few to several are doing those things at the same time, you need more bandwidth. If you were to drop it down to 10meg, you will have unhappy household members. At 30 you will notice a difference but may still make everyone happy. If I was in your shoes I would drop to 50meg. I don't think anyone will really notice the difference.

At my house it's basically just my wife and myself. I have one kid left but she doesn't do much. Maybe netflix once in a blue moon. We rarely do netflix and we are content with our 15meg.
 

born2ride

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Thanks.. right now with no or limited cable it's not unusual to have three or four netflix streams going and i always have torrent clients running. My thoughts are bring back tv and that will lower internet usages , 50 maybe will work fine then!
 

bp2008

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If I were you I would not consider anything lower than 50 Mbps for your household. 30 Mbps could be filled up easily under peak usage, causing unhappy household members. But I think you could get by with 50 (keeping in mind it may max out in the mid 40s if it is anything like my 50 Mbps DSL). It should handle all the video streaming, but the main concern is that torrents might run a lot slower particularly under peak usage. I have not run a torrent client in about a decade so I don't really know how fast they tend to go anymore. If your torrenters are used to seeing download speeds well above 50 Mbps, they probably won't like it when suddenly everything takes 2 to 4 times as long to download (depending on usage at the time).

Also if your household has anyone who is serious about real-time online games, it will make them unhappy when they experience lag due to too much uploading or downloading going on. You can usually solve this with a good QOS router that identifies torrents and large downloads and reduces their priority, but it is not trivial to set up.

Lastly, since you mention torrents, make sure their ability to upload data is strictly controlled. Even a constant 1 Mbps is too much, since over the span of a month that is 328 GB. It would put you into the top few percentage of users. Unthrottled torrent seeding could be a lot worse. Think 1+ TB per month for months in a row. When ISPs see users like that, they see a strong argument in favor of (re-)imposing bandwidth caps (like 250 GB per month).

TV service is not very cost effective anymore. High end satellite TV costs in the neighborhood of $150 a month and you can buy A LOT of shows and movies from amazon instant video for that, and then stream them any time, on demand, without commercials. Cheaper TV is missing a lot of the channels that anyone cares about. Maybe you have good cable TV in your area, but I've never lived in such an area so I don't know what the costs are like for cable vs satellite.

Dish internet is probably via satellite, which means the worst latency of any internet technology and data caps nearly as bad as cellular. You don't want that. Even if it isn't satellite internet, 10 Mbps is definitely not enough for your household.
 

born2ride

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@bp2008

Wow you are correct! I checked my data usage past 6 months all average 365 to over 400gb! Holy cow I need to throttle back my clients!
I agree with the information you offered about the household, I will have to look for a better way to keep current on tv shows!

 
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