As the title states.
Both myself and my parter are avid gamers.
All 4 kids are also gamers, but watch Netflix etc. too and with our current connection, all is fine.
Our main concern is that we both are remote workers and work from home, anything that throttled our internet connection would become unsustainable to us.
Some sites say that 70mbps is pushing it, but should be okay, others say it’s completely untangible
Any advice is greatly appreciated
If I understood right, you’re downgrading your connection from 500 to 70Mbps, and the question is whether this will be enough for six people?
I’d say it depends on to what degree all six of you will be doing bandwith intensive things at the same time.
For example, Netflix recommends minimum 15Mpbs for a 4k stream, so if all six of you will be doing that on separate screens at the same time, you’ll be about 20Mpbs short. But if everyone is on 1080 screens you’ll be fine as the requirement is 5Mpbs per stream.
Remote work doesn’t necessarily require a lot of bandwidth, although it depends on what you actually do for work. MS Teams for example only requires about 2Mpbs for group video calls.
Most gaming also doesn’t require a lot of bandwidth, but of course downloading games and their updates does.
Will it work? Yes I think so, though you may encounter times when it gets laggy.
Don’t forget if work has a VPN the speeds will be slowed even further! My wife and I both have VPN for WFH… we have Xfinity 1200D/40U and she is constantly complaining her video calls are dropping. We test speeds when she is not on VPN and (wirelessly) she gets around 300D/20U but then we connect to her works VPN and it suddenly goes to about 80D/7U. When I wirelessly am on VPN I get 130D/20U.
No downloading during business hours 😁
Maybe set up a small server on the network that can act as a cache, like steam cache for example.
Caching proxy server.
Yeah and turn off cloud connected home video cameras. Video upload is horrible at that connection speed with 6 users.
You’ll be unhappy.
Why are you downgrading? Call the company and see if they have any specials for like 2 years at a reduced cost for the 500Mbps
I would not want to do that. One game update and the whole connection is struggling. Xbox/PS5 downloading something in standby? Not fun.
One game update and the whole connection is struggling
What are you smoking. Ive run a 60mb connection for 10 years and been fine with multiple things downloading.
if everyone is at home and using their devices, you will notice issues. if the work and the gaming/netflix are done at different times it can be done with little issues.
I wouldn’t skimp… imagine a world were your boss, partner and your kids are screaming at you because thats were this is headed.
UHD and Dolby Vision content will easily sap 55Mbps in chunks. Hopefully you have a decent router to apportion it fairly. I’m not saying it’ll be unusable, but you will probably get some slowdowns or dips in video quality.
I have a family of 5 and I can tell you it’s not going to be fun.
Number one thing is that no one is going to announce what they are doing at the time, so bandwidth usage is going to be all over the place.
Add on the fact that every device in your house will download/upload randomly depending on what applications those devices have on them.
You’re essentially giving everyone 10Mbps download and I’m going to assume sub-1Mbps upload.
That is a big nope.I’m a specialist at work and support everything.
I get calls with people with less than 30 having all sorts of issues working remote, single users, no smart home devices, no file transfers happening, only person in the house.
Since Covid, we can support 1500 people remotely. We have spent on new Cisco switches, and remote appliances and enough bandwidth to support everyone. Everyone with higher speed does not have an issue.
Also don’t be someone remote also connected on wifi. This does not help VPN one bit. especially with only an ISP provided router.
If you work from home with that connection speed, your ONLY course of action is to hope you have a local desktop at work on their gigabit network that does all the work, while you manipulate it remotely, which requires the minimum amount of connection.
IT blows my mind when people go home with their laptops, and work on huge excel documents full of macros, and need access to share drives to accomplish their goals.
What could take them 10 minutes here at work will be 2.5 hours remotely. Add another VPN user at home and a bunch of kids with various streaming/gaming needs and it’ll be horrible. Trust me.
Those are up-to speeds. You’ll likely get less on average. From my experience, expect as much as 20% slower speeds than advertised on most days.
I personally wouldn’t downgrade to 70Mbps. Maybe if they have an option between, that may be better if you’re trying to reduce monthly costs.
You also may run into upload speed issues as others have said, though that may not change between the two packages you mentioned. With my local ISP(s), you get the same shitty upload speeds for all packages except 1Gbps.
Your mileage may vary.
it’s possible if suspend big game downloads between business hours, start the big downloads at night for example like we did in the 90’s with 56K/ISDN/DSL.
Set Netflix to HD only (No 4K) at least for everyone elses user account maybe even set them to 720p, get a router with good QOS and you might be ok. Upload is also pretty damn important for the work from home aspect.
Set Netflix to 360p, use a water well and put the restroom outside. Problems solved.
You will need to QoS the heck out of work vs personal, as a single twitch stream can take up to 10Mbps down.
Also plan on getting less than 70, as they talk in legal speak. Your speed is “up to 70Mbps” and not “is 70Mbps”.
Gaming requires latency. Streaming 1080p requires 5mb down Steaming 4K needs about 25mb Zoom 1080p requires 2mb up and down Security cameras could use 1-2mb up
The important for zoom is uploads. If you have cable with 10mb up, you could struggle. If it’s 70/70 you should be ok.
Add a 2nd internet service that is work only with your computers hardwired. Long story, but we have three services at our house.
You mentioned 70mbps download, but what is your upload bandwidth? It’s often surprisingly terrible.
After a month of terrible internet connectivity, I noticed issues occurring when a particular device was turned on. After investigation, I spotted the issue was being caused by Microsoft OneDrive saturating my upload bandwidth. The issue caused problems with download and upload on all devices connected to the network.
People and ISP marketing focus on downloads but in reality it’s important to focus on upload to the same degree as download.