Do you need a Gigabit internet connection?

ISPs have started advertising gigabit connections at affordable prices. But do you really need such a connection? Are they worth their money?

And finally the technicians dug under your house and brought the infamous fiber to your neighborhood. They also entered your apartment building, put some gray boxes in the corridor and the war of announcements and offers began. We give you Gigabit line!

Gigabit internet connection has become something of a standard now, which determines whether your neighborhood has "good" internet access or not. But do you really need it? If it is really too much for your needs, what do you really need and how can you save money by avoiding waste? Let's look at it a little more globally.

Gigabit and home use

In a typical Greek family where the father hangs out on Facebook, the mother mostly surfs static websites, and only the teenagers maybe do some consumption playing games, the gigabit speed is too much. Not to mention the grandpa who is still trying to figure out how to connect with his bank.

With the gigabit connection you are certainly more comfortable, but you are not so many that it justifies its existence. It's like having an amazing performance car that goes from 0-100 km in 5 seconds and you use it to go shopping downtown. For a single moment when you have the opportunity to go full throttle on the open road, you spend a monthly amount that is disproportionate to most of the time of use.

On the other hand, if you hear an advertisement from a provider you will think that gigabit speed is vital for everyday life. They'll tell you that insanely fast fiber internet is important for gaming, getting everyone connected at the same time and everyone downloading tons of data, and so on. You would think that without a gigabit connection, you are still in the paleolithic with dialup connections.

All three major providers, Cosmote, Vodafone and Nova offer gigabit connections for around 50 euros per month. Don't get confused with Nova's super offer of 33 euros. It is 1 Gbps for its internal network and 200 Mbps to the other networks is !!.

And you have the 50 euros to throw away. Are these all enough, or will you have to spend a significant amount of money to upgrade your network equipment and devices?

Don't expect providers to be completely honest with you and tell you that you'd probably be perfectly happy with their cheapest package. It costs them the same amount of money to maintain broadband in your home whether you use a 100 Mbps package or a 1 Gbps package. So why would they want you to pay €24 a month when you could be paying more?

If you have the €50/month gigabit plan and downgrade to the €300/month 35Mbps plan, there's a good chance you'll never notice the difference. Except maybe out of your pocket.

But let's take a look at how much bandwidth a home actually needs for day-to-day activities, so you can understand how rarely the average home would need a gigabit connection.

How much bandwidth do you really need?

ISPs tell you that you need a gigabit connection to enjoy a good gaming experience, smooth video streaming through services like Netflix, and to have online learning or remote work.

Don't get us wrong, reliable broadband access is very important for working remotely, enjoying streaming video, etc. But reliable doesn't mean the fastest internet speed available in your area.

When we took a deep dive into analyzing the actual bandwidth requirements of a modern home, looking at both the download speed and upload speed that the average person needs, our conclusion was that for the majority of people, a symmetrical 100 Mbps download and upload is the golden ratio.

What makes us say it with such confidence? The recommended minimum download speed for streaming 4K video is 15 Mbps. Activities such as browsing social media, gaming, video conferencing and watching HD video only require about 5 Mbps. General web browsing and streaming require even less, adding only about 2-3 Mbps.

How often do multiple people in your household watch 4K video at the same time, while other people play demanding games, video call, and browse social media? A good rule of thumb is that you need about 25 Mbps of bandwidth for each active internet user in your home, assuming that there may be a time when everyone is using the internet simultaneously and in a demanding manner.

In a household of four, such as, for example, two parents and two teenagers, a gigabit Internet connection offers ten times the speed per person. There is no practical need for each user to have 200-250 Mbps of dedicated bandwidth (or even the entire gigabit line) when demand is low.

Maybe someday in the future, when we have 16K video streaming and holodecks, people will need that kind of bandwidth, but they don't need it today.

For most users, when you pay an extra €300+ a year for faster internet, you're really paying for a small amount of convenience that you rarely need. Unless you're downloading large files every day for work or hobby, and at the same time waiting time is a major factor, it just doesn't matter that much.

We can't generalize this logic to everyone, but if we had to choose between "spending 300 euros a year on video games" or "spending 300 euros to download video games a little faster", it's not hard to decide where we'd rather spend the money. our money.

On the other hand, there are not only the big three providers in the market. There is also Inalan which operates only in Athens and Thessaloniki and offers symmetrical internet and indeed without time commitment. 200 Up/200 down with 28 euros per month. What does she want to tell us now? How important is a symmetrical connection?

You need the upload speed

Although a fiber optic internet connection could easily be symmetrical, they are sold as asynchronous and thus the upload and download speeds are different and the former is less than ten times the latter.

Upload speed is important if you have multiple security cameras in your home that you want to access remotely, or if you have multiple people in the home doing things that depend on uploading to the internet, such as video conferencing or streaming game content.

Also if you host a lot of data services on your computer, if your local computer is streaming Netflix via Plex or if you're hosting a personal cloud service from your home, then you're going to need some serious upload speed.

Unfortunately, because they're afraid you'll go underground and put your home on some illegal movie torrent network, companies offer higher download speeds than upload speeds. Unless you get a gigabit line and that way you will have 100 Mbps upload.

So if you need a serious upload speed, you should either go to Inalan, or get the one gigabit package to get at least 100 Mbps upload.

Connection vs equipment

The price difference between a 100 Mbps line of 24 euros and a gigabit line of 50 euros per month is calculated at 50-25=25 euros per month. For 12 months it means 300 euros a year. Let's see what you got with that money.

On the one hand you have a 1000/100 Mbps connection with a provider's router that is certainly not even average in features. On the other hand, you have a 100/10 Mbps (or even better, a 100/100 Inalan line) and 300 euros in excess with which you can upgrade your router.

Everyone needs a modern router and if you really don't need a gigabit line then you can spend that money on equipment.

It's rare for users with connections above the 25 Mbps per person we mentioned earlier to be unhappy with their internet speed. What they're really unhappy with is their crappy old router that can't keep up with a house full of dozens of Wi-Fi connected IoT devices.

So stop throwing away €300 a year on upgraded broadband connections that you don't even use up. Spend that money once on a new Wi-Fi router and enjoy a smoother experience across all your devices.