Is (Bell/Rogers) fibre gigabit internet worth it?
And how to make your slower speed feel more like gigabit
I’ve been using 50Mbps internet for about 10 years. Is the jump to 1+Gbps worth it?
This is one of those questions where it’s like, “if you don’t know you need it, then you probably don’t.”
So, probably not.
For context, I upgraded from:
Before: $40 CAD (~$30 USD) for 50Mbps download / 10Mbps upload
After: $75 CAD (~$55 USD) for 1.5Gbps download / 1Gbps upload
(Weird details that ISPs threw at me to make the comparison harder: I was offered 300/100 for $45 to stay with the old ISP and the new ISP gave me with a $200 gift card. Yeesh, where’s the regulation on this stuff?)
So that’s 30x the bits for less than half the price. Seems like a no-brainer, right? Well…
After a month of the new speeds, as a heavy-internet-using 30-device household, I’ve noticed almost no difference in day-to-day life. Except for one thing. Part of that is just the nature of bandwidth. The rest is because I’d already done what I could to get the most out of my slow plan.
The one, huge, noticeable difference
The one noticeable difference was thankfully the reason I upgraded in the first place: moving large files to and from cloud storage.
Dropping a 1GB file onto your Dropbox/Google Drive/OneDrive/iCloud/S3 thing without it blinking is the best part of the higher speed. A new project I’m working on has me transferring large files (and a lot of smaller ones) to and from cloud storage. This is where I actually notice the biggest speed increase.
So if this is you, it can totally be worth it. But like I said, if this is you then you probably know you need more bandwidth anyway.
Where I expected to notice it but didn’t
I assumed software updates would be super fast. Not really. The download is faster for sure, but the install time doesn’t change and still restarts your computer so it’s still a flow interrupter. Not sure why I thought this would be hugely different but nope.
Likewise with downloading new games or game updates. Faster, sure, but not life-alteringly fast. I’m not sure it matters to me if it takes 4 minutes until a new game is ready vs 20 minutes. I’ve still moved on to do something else. I can’t sit still for 4 minutes! YMMV here.
Where there’s a smaller, sometimes-noticeable, difference
Sometimes, previously, I would be downloading a large file, and that would choke my network and so other things would slow down for a few minutes. My PS4 used to hog bandwidth like this a lot downloading game updates. This was solved previously by limiting certain devices to not be a bandwidth hog in my router settings.
Now, everything can just go hog-wild with no bandwidth controls. If you’re not interested in learning how to use your router settings, this can be a benefit for sure.
Likewise, my Apple TV can download new 1GB screensaver videos all the damn time instead of showing me the same one for a month. But that’s such a small life upgrade I can’t believe I’m writing it down. I guess that’s how unnoticeable the upgrade has been!
Where I didn’t expect to notice it and also didn’t
Streaming is no different than it was. The big upgrade to streaming speed was a wired connection into my TV. I did that years ago and noticed a huge boost in how fast movies would start and how quickly you can skip forward or scrub through a video and how rarely they’d cut out. The new bandwidth didn’t change this much, but I never felt this was an issue.
Jumping around in some 4K videos can be faster, particularly on wifi, but that’s not something I find myself doing a lot. If ever.
Likewise, video calls haven’t been noticeably better. Again, that huge jump came from wiring in our computers to ethernet for calls. Which we did years and years ago. They’re just as solid now as they were before.
If you have to use wifi for these things for some reason, you may notice an improvement here but also:
Where you might think you notice gigabit helping but it’s probably something else
The routers that come with gigabit internet plans are sooooo much faster than the old once-top-of-the-line-now-garbage one I’ve had in my home for a decade. (I turned off its wifi and installed a mesh system a few years ago.)
So if you’re still using old hardware, and you upgrade and get new hardware, then you may think that gigabit is awesome and totally changed your life but most of that change could be that you’re just using newer wifi technology.
Not to discount that benefit. It’s an easy way to get an upgrade if you don’t want to learn about or shop for routers.
When gigabit is completely pointless
If you’re using a VPN, you’re even less likely to benefit from these speeds. I tried a couple VPNs (both paid services) and got 100–300 Mbps on speed tests. Once disconnected, it was back up to gigabit speeds.
How to make your current system feel more like gigabit!
These are pretty boring options that can be pricey and involve some work. So, you might be inclined to just upgrade to gigabit and move on with your life. But doing any of them might help you out enough to solve your issues.
1. Use ethernet (and disable wifi) for any devices that don’t move
TVs, your work computer, game consoles you use a lot, etc. Not only do you get a better streaming and video call experience, but it also takes heavy users off the wifi and makes the wifi better for everyone else. You can get flat cables that go under carpets, and/or plastic channels that hide them along baseboards if you’re concerned about cable clutter.
You can even install them in walls if you have access from, say, an unfinished basement. Unless you’re lucky enough to already have ethernet in the walls, in which case, use that with a mesh router and/or switch or two. (The network kind, not the Nintendo kind.)
2. Get a high-quality mesh router system
If you have wifi issues in your house, get a mesh router system, then disable the wifi on your main router. You may need to watch some videos to figure it out, but there’s plenty of info out there.
If possible, running an ethernet cable between your mesh system nodes is the way to go if they don’t have perfect line-of-sight. Though I ran two nodes on opposite ends of a long hallway without a cable and they worked flawlessly.
Just note that wifi isn’t very good at passing through dense materials like brick or stone, electical wiring, or pipes. Don’t expect your mesh wifi to work well if there’s a bathroom between the nodes, for example.
3. Limit your bandwidth on devices that eat bandwidth for breakfast
Think game consoles and streaming devices. This is not a feature on every router, sadly. But if you have it, use it. I find strict bandwidth limits work better than automated or ai-driven QoS systems (which also often require harvesting your data!) and you don’t need to limit your devices by much to get the benefits.
I had set all my heavy-use devices to max at 60% of the total available. So, 30Mbps of 50Mbps, for example. For work computers in a home with more than one WFH’er, I set them all to 80% which is generally low enough not to cause issues but enough to not notice the dip when only one person is working.
No need to restrict it on everything though. Smart devices, for example, barely use anything. Just think of which devices you see long downloading bars on all the time, or stream video on.
4. Turn off auto-downloading updates
You should still download and install updates, particularly security ones, but don’t let your devices do it when you’re, like, in the middle of an important business call, y’know?
How much bandwidth to get, then?
I don’t think I’d go back to 50/10 again, mostly because of the 10 upload. But I think 50/20 per person is probably enough. So for a family for four, 200/100 should be plenty.
If you look at pricing pages, you’ll see that’s roughly the sweet spot because that’s when the incremental cost for huge jumps gets smaller. For example, going from 50Mbps to 100 is going to cost a lot more than 200Mbps to 500. They know you aren’t going to use much beyond 100Mbps anyway, so they’re happy to only take a few extra dollars for the occasional spike you’ll use.
And there’s no need to go above 1Gbps if you want the speed for a single device, say to download stuff even faster. Even wired, you’re unlikely to be able to get more than that to a single device. Gigabit ethernet ports, the faster of the most commonly found these days, only go to that speed anyway. I had to replace the hub in my house just to get 1Gbps that because my old one only supported 100Mbps.
And even if you do replace your whole network with super-fast wired 10G network devices and cables, many servers won’t even let you download stuff that fast. I rarely see downloads even reach 0.5Gbps.
I’m not sure my household has ever hit over 1Gbps or ever will. So that extra 0.5Gbps is pretty pointless. Maybe one day I’ll give it a stress test just for … fun? No, I can probably find better ways to have fun.
Maybe. I did just spend my afternoon writing this up. Yeesh. Hope this helps someone, somewhere, sometime. (This was the kind of info I was looking for when I was considering it!)
A little update: I’ve found two issues trying to keep my entire (wired) network at gigabit speeds. The first problem is with USB-C dongles, many of which don’t seem to offer gigabit speeds when plugged directly into a Mac running the latest OS (Ventura).
Apparently one solution is to get a 2.5Gbps adapter, so will report back after I test some of those out. (The other is to install drivers for the chipset but there’s no easy installer that worked with macOS 11+ and I absolutely refuse to do hacky command-line driver installs!)
The other issue is with the networking switches. I’ve swapped out a couple switches in the house with gigabit switches. They work well. But when I plugged the aforementioned dongles into a Cat 5e cable connected to the switch, all the devices fell down to 100Mbps. I had to restart the switch before the other computers (with working gigabit ports) would do gigabit speeds again.
I’m not sure what triggers this, but it’s worth more testing and I’ll post any results I find here. It’s really easy not to notice this, so it’s worth doing some regular speed tests while you get everything up and running.
Last updated Dec 2022, one month into gigabit use. I’ll update this post with any changes if I notice anything else.
