Whether you live alone or with a family, the necessity of internet usage in all daily lives is core to so many aspects of our lives, and it’s only going to become more so. It’s important to make the right choice the first time, so what do you need to know?
Now and Future Use
Home internet has now reached the point where most of us have access to far more speed than we’ll need. This is thanks to fibre, which can offer tremendously high bandwidth, far above all casual use cases. While all these different choices are great for customising a plan for your budget, it also means that looking at your specific expectations is an unavoidable first step.
The first thing to keep in mind is that every active user on your home connection will essentially divide your total bandwidth cap by that number. While bandwidth division doesn’t technically work this way, this approach can help you calculate your needs, see when you might run into a bottleneck, and determine the level of plan you’ll need.
As an example, consider if you live in a home with four other people, all of whom might like to watch high-quality individual video streams at the same time. Systems like Google recommend a bandwidth of around 20 Mbps for an optimal streaming experience at 4K resolutions, but in real-life applications, 50 Mbps is a better target. This means if five people are streaming this video at once, an unlikely but possible scenario, then a minimum connection speed of 250 Mbps would be a good starting point.
On the other hand, you might live with one other person, where one person might be happy with 1080p video streams (around 5 Mbps), and the other might like playing online bingo UK games. Whether connecting over a computer or mobile, these rooms, like Cash Cubes and Liberty Bingo, require a similarly low level of bandwidth to run at full performance. This means, including a safe buffer space, the speeds required in this instance wouldn’t reach above 50 Mbps.
Looking Towards the Future
The big caveats we need to look at here come from two areas. The first is that, over time, general internet bandwidth requirements will increase. As the standard of speed becomes faster, data sizes drift higher, so future-proofing can mean adding another 30% or so to your plan speed.
The second issue is that ISPs' plans tend to become cheaper over time, but users on existing plans are not informed of this. To counter this issue, check plan speeds with your ISP at the beginning of each year, and you might be able to find the same plan for less, or a better plan for the same price.
Preparing for the future of your home internet needs isn’t as complicated as it might seem. You can figure it out in an afternoon, just remember to write down your reasoning in case you forget why you made your decision later. Follow the above advice, and you and your family will be set for the years ahead.
