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There are three parameters of concern with your ISP. Bandwidth, Latency (and Jitter), and Data Caps. Bandwidth is less of a concern for most people as data rat

There are three parameters of concern with your ISP. Bandwidth, Latency (and Jitter), and Data Caps. Bandwidth is less of a concern for most people as data rates are over 500mb+ . That's enough to comfortably stream 5 concurrent 4k streams (at 20mbps). Latency and jitter will have a bigger impact on real time applications, particularly video conferencing , VOIP, gaming , and to a lesser extent video streaming when you are scrubbing the feed. You can test yours at https://speed.cloudflare.com/ https://speed.cloudflare.com/ . If your video is jittery or laggy, and you are having trouble with natural conversation, latency / jitter are likely the issue. Data Caps are a real concern for most people. At 1gbps, most people are hitting their 1-1.5tb data cap within an hour or so. Assuming you are around 500mbps or more, latency & data caps are a bigger concern.

lxgr 2y ago
> At 1gbps, most people are hitting their 1-1.5tb data cap within an hour or so. Assuming you're talking about consumers: How? All that data needs to go somewhere! Even multiple 4K streams only take a fraction of one gigabit/s, and while downloads can often saturate a connection, the total transmitted amount of data is capped by storage capacities. That's not to say that data caps are a good thing, but conversely it also doesn't mean that gigabit connections with terabit-sized data caps are useless.
Izkata 2y ago
> gaming Gamers tend to have an intuitive understanding of latency, they just use the words "lag" and "ping" instead.
daemonologist 2y ago
Another problem around data caps is that even if you have/pay extra for "unlimited" data, there's still a point where your ISP will fire you as a customer (or threaten to do so) for using too much data - I've heard of it around 8-10 TB on Comcast for example. Unlike with mobile plans there's no soft cap in the contract, they just decide when you've breached the ToS/AUP and can cut you off at their sole discretion.

lxgr 2y ago

> At 1gbps, most people are hitting their 1-1.5tb data cap within an hour or so. Assuming you're talking about consumers: How? All that data needs to go somewhere! Even multiple 4K streams only take a fraction of one gigabit/s, and while downloads can often saturate a connection, the total transmitted amount of data is capped by storage capacities. That's not to say that data caps are a good thing, but conversely it also doesn't mean that gigabit connections with terabit-sized data caps are useless.

Izkata 2y ago

> gaming Gamers tend to have an intuitive understanding of latency, they just use the words "lag" and "ping" instead.

daemonologist 2y ago

Another problem around data caps is that even if you have/pay extra for "unlimited" data, there's still a point where your ISP will fire you as a customer (or threaten to do so) for using too much data - I've heard of it around 8-10 TB on Comcast for example. Unlike with mobile plans there's no soft cap in the contract, they just decide when you've breached the ToS/AUP and can cut you off at their sole discretion.