Internet Speed Question

[burgerkingdiamond]

I'm trying* to buy a house soon, and I need to minimize my monthly expenses. I plan on not having cable TV (I can do without reality shows and local news), or a home phone. But I cannot do without internet. One provider that I checked has their cheapest plan at $31.99/month for "Internet download speed up to 3 Mbps, upload speed up to 768 Kbps."

I haven't done any online gaming stuff like COD in a few months, and I don't know if I ever will get into that again. But I guess I would want the option to if something comes out that I'm interested in.

What I'm mainly interested in is YouTube, Netflix, moderate file downloading, generally web surfing, and possibly online gaming.

Can anybody tell me if this will do?

[junkeR]

That may be a little on the lower end for Netflix and the type of things you want to do. I've used Netflix on a 1MBPS connection, and high-def wasn't an option along with the occasional quality drop. You could certainly try it out to see how things will go. I would probably deal with a bit longer if a wait if it is going to save me 20+ dollars a month.

[CMoon]

I've got AT&T's U-verse (no TV, no phone) for $40 a month and it's plenty fast! I don't know if you can directly order that particular package though. I had to order everything and then cancel all the parts I didn't want.

[moozooh]

YouTube's current bitrate allocation for 720p content is 2 Mbit/s. Thus you should be able to watch it real-time.

Wikipedia on NetFlix:

According to Netflix Tech Support, there are three primary speed/quality grades. Their minimum streaming bandwidth requires 1.5Mbps, providing a video quality similar to DVD video, with stereo sound. The next quality grade requires up to 3Mbps, providing "better than DVD quality" and stereo sound. The highest quality grade requires up to 6 Mbps, providing either 720 or 1080 resolution, depending on hardware. At this time (December 2010) only the PS3 is able to stream 1080 resolution, and is also capable of streaming surround sound.

Ah, there's nothing a couple minutes' worth of wiki queries can't do.

[burgerkingdiamond]

YouTube's current bitrate allocation for 720p content is 2 Mbit/s. Thus you should be able to watch it real-time.

Wikipedia on NetFlix:

According to Netflix Tech Support, there are three primary speed/quality grades. Their minimum streaming bandwidth requires 1.5Mbps, providing a video quality similar to DVD video, with stereo sound. The next quality grade requires up to 3Mbps, providing "better than DVD quality" and stereo sound. The highest quality grade requires up to 6 Mbps, providing either 720 or 1080 resolution, depending on hardware. At this time (December 2010) only the PS3 is able to stream 1080 resolution, and is also capable of streaming surround sound.

Ah, there's nothing a couple minutes' worth of wiki queries can't do.

Well that's nice and specific. Thanks.

I know that you can Google anything. I was looking for the actual experiences of people who may have similar internet speeds.

[Ganelon]

You won't be able to play online fighters smoothly. While bandwidth above a certain point is unnecessary, you need a higher upload rate for that; <1Mbps is too slow. Let's say 2MB at the minimum for smooth play. What's also important for gaming is latency. If you ping your ISP, you can see how long it takes to reach your nearest data node before being pushed onward to your destination.

[burgerkingdiamond]

You won't be able to play online fighters smoothly. While bandwidth above a certain point is unnecessary, you need a higher upload rate for that; <1Mbps is too slow. Let's say 2MB at the minimum for smooth play. What's also important for gaming is latency. If you ping your ISP, you can see how long it takes to reach your nearest data node before being pushed onward to your destination.

Thanks for that info as well. The next package up is +$24, which is not worth it to me for online FPS. So I'll probably just roll with this.

[moozooh]

Do modern games really require that much bandwidth now? It pretty much tells how much data you can send or receive at a time, the actual speed of it going back and forth, however, is not by any means guaranteed to be high. Extra 30+ ms of ping difference, which is the actual speed, will obviously impede your performance more than having 1 mbps instead of 2.

[Ganelon]

Rollback schemes used in netcode implementations like GGPO require considerable bandwidth, enough that it's unplayably laggy on even 2Mbps if you're watching a non-HD YouTube vid at the same time. I've played on multiple configurations in multiple locations and can guarantee additional lag at under 2Mbps dl/ul doing nothing else; planning on doing anything simultaneously will require much more bandwidth.

Many folks seem to assume that all the game is sending is a few bits for input on your end and receiving the other players' inputs but it seems always the case that there's a lot more riding on top of that. Anyway, 5Mbps of download is easy to get for a fair price but getting even 2Mbps is tough to affordably spot. But if money is no object, you're primarily interested in gaming, you can get 20/20 from 1 ISP or 30/20 from another ISP, and both ISPs are equally reliable, then your best bet is to ignore bandwidth and get the one with lower latency.

[burgerkingdiamond]

Rollback schemes used in netcode implementations like GGPO require considerable bandwidth, enough that it's unplayably laggy on even 2Mbps if you're watching a non-HD YouTube vid at the same time. I've played on multiple configurations in multiple locations and can guarantee additional lag at under 2Mbps dl/ul doing nothing else; planning on doing anything simultaneously will require much more bandwidth.

Many folks seem to assume that all the game is sending is a few bits for input on your end and receiving the other players' inputs but it seems always the case that there's a lot more riding on top of that. Anyway, 5Mbps of download is easy to get for a fair price but getting even 2Mbps is tough to affordably spot. But if money is no object, you're primarily interested in gaming, you can get 20/20 from 1 ISP or 30/20 from another ISP, and both ISPs are equally reliable, then your best bet is to ignore bandwidth and get the one with lower latency.

Ok. Online gaming is actually my lowest priority at this point. It sounds like Netflix should be decent enough. DVD quality is good enough for me. So I think I'll just do the cheap plan.