these days your options for high-speed internet start at just a few megabits
per second and go all the way up to gigabit speeds or even more
now of course the isps want you to fork over as much of your money as possible
for a higher speed connection with vague wording about how it's good for gaming
or multiple devices or what have you but how much should you really be paying
for well here's the thing part of the reason
that internet service providers offer so many access tiers is that not everyone
needs the same sized pipe coming into their home
you shouldn't buy a 10-seat minivan if you're single with no kids and in much
the same way it's probably a waste to have an insanely fast internet
connection if you live alone with one computer and a phone this means the 64
thousand dollar question when choosing an internet plan is what are you using
the service for and how many gadgets will be accessing it at once after that
the process mostly becomes a matter of simple addition
you see it turns out that predicting how much speed each common task requires is
fairly straightforward suppose you want to stream hd video and i would assume
you do otherwise you probably wouldn't be watching this for sites like youtube
and netflix you'll need between a 5 and 10 megabit per second connection if you
want your experience to be reliably smooth now of course if you want to stream 4k
or HDR your data rates are going to be quite a bit higher most of the popular
streaming platforms recommend anywhere from 15 to 25 megabit per second and we
would suggest going a fair bit higher than that somewhere in the 40 to 50
megabit range this will account for any dips in your service speed during heavy
load times or if a Windows update is running in the background somewhere the
thing to keep in mind though is that this is on a per video basis
so if you wanted to stream on more than one screen you need to multiply that
speed times the total number of videos that you foresee your household playing
on your connection at once that way your Techquickie stream won't
cut out because your inconsiderate roommate is trying to watch his rebooted
90s sitcoms in 4k next we've got to consider our other
data heavy doings besides streaming video like gaming it might surprise you
though to know that you don't need insane speeds to have a great gaming
experience in fact typically if you can have at least 10 megabits per second
free on whatever device you're gaming on it'll probably be enough
the more important consideration for gaming is going to be latency now you
can learn more about latency up here but in short it's the delay between your
computer or your phone requesting something from the server and the server
sending the data back to you and vice versa and it's actually possible nay
common to have a service that boasts high speeds but also suffers from high
latency which can result in weird leggy behavior while you're gaming
and the really tricky thing here is that as you pay more for a higher speed tier
your latency may not improve at all
so if you have several isps to choose from
read reviews and see if there are any in your area where gamers have specifically
recommended it for its lower latency also keep in mind that low latency is
equally important for other real-time applications such as video chatting with
your long distance love interest one more gaming and video chat specific
consideration is that unlike web browsing it's important to make sure
that you're getting a decent amount of upstream speed for these applications
a solid 10 to megabits per second per device should be fine for high quality
video calls and streaming to twitch in high definition now aside from
applications the other most common reason that you might want a faster
connection is if you are often transferring large files like game
installers or large video files for example if you were trying to
download a 2 Gigabyte movie that would take about 2 minutes and 40 seconds on a
100 megabit per second connection so it's a simple matter of doing the math
for how long it takes you to prepare a bucket of popcorn and going from there
finally although i know the title of this episode is how much speed you need
we should probably also mention data caps those are those nasty little limits
that some isps slap onto your service where if you exceed a certain amount per
month you'll be looking at consequences like throttling or extra charges
now data caps shouldn't be too much of a concern for web browsing but you can
quickly run up against them if you're gaming streaming or watching a ton of
video so have a look at this chart to see how much data per hour these
activities usually consume and then you can use some quick math to see how high
of a cap you might need every month the bottom line is that there's no point
over paying for either speed or data that is unless you're that person that
likes to leave your wi-fi unsecured because you're just feeling
really generous towards your whole neighborhood so hopefully you found this
video helpful speaking of helpful brilliant is all
about helping you get just a little bit smarter every day they publish several
daily challenges that provide a quick and fascinating view into math logic
science engineering or computer science and it's daily that means every day so
whether you're stuck in a commute or just want to learn something new brilliance daily challenges are a fun
bite-sized way to master concepts by applying them each challenge comes with
illustrations animations or interactive visualizations and includes all the
context that you need to solve it for yourself so if you want to actively
learn new fascinating concepts each day
head over to brilliant.org techwiki we're going to have that linked below
and finish your day a fair bit smarter see my talking points say a little bit
but you also watched techwiki so you get extra credit for that the first 200 of
you to do so are going to get 20 off brilliant annual premium subscription so
you can view all of the daily challenges in the archives and unlock their dozens
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