How Fast is "Fast Enough?"

Determining what an acceptable internet access speed “ought to be” requires knowing how many users are sharing a connection, what they do when connected, how often they are connected simultaneously, the days of week and times of day when that happens. 

And it is hard to avoid the conclusion that most of the discussion we hear about “how fast is fast enough, ” when it comes to internet access and home broadband,  is a political or lifestyle or values statement, not a technology statement. 

The minimum amount of bandwidth to support one user is not the same as that to support four users, each connected simultaneously to a few devices. Even assuming every user requires streaming video support, most of the time, minimum bandwidth requirements are not that stringent. 

source: Minim

In fact, the single best rule might be the number of concurrent users and concurrent video streams that must be supported. Not many households will find they really require speeds above 500 Mbps, assuming latency performance and upstream bandwidth requirements are tolerable. 

All that said, would I willingly downgrade from my gigabit connection, which I know I really do not need, even back to 500 Mbps or 600 Mbps? No. But that is not based on any real performance advantage I can perceive. All of my requirements are, in principle, met by a connection operating at 25 Mbps. 

I haven’t had a connection running that slow in a few decades. My consumption keeps growing, but as a technology matter I cannot really argue that I generally “need” speeds as high as I pay for. 

 

source: Minim

In a sense, the behavior is many decades old, sort of done for the same reasons as I always have purchased mobile data usage buckets that exceeded my expected usage.

The logic is similar to the reasons people often buy “unlimited usage” consumption plans that typically exceed their anticipated usage. 

The value is predictability of payment amounts, not a fine-tuned analysis of price versus usage relationships. In fact, people tend to pay more than they need to, to assure predictability of the recurring payments. 

In a similar manner, having a speed “up to Xbps” means that when the network gets congested, I still can expect to have .6Xbps as a realistic experience. Obviously, what matters is the speed one actually experiences at the most-congested part of the day, when running the most demanding applications, with the most concurrent devices or users.