11-04-2015, 01:12 PM
This is a huge pet peeve of mine. Bandwidth is not speed! This is one of the biggest scams that ISPs have pulled on consumers in our lifetime and it has somehow completely confused most people as to what Bandwidth really is.
Bandwidth is not how fast data moves, but rather how much data can be transferred in a given time. Think of your bandwidth (i.e. 30MB/s) as a pipe with water flowing through it. If you have this massive pipe (bandwidth) and yet you only need to a trickle of water (Data) does it flow any faster? The answer is no. Netflix on high definition uses roughly 7MB/s, if you were watching a movie on Netflix and browsing the internet at the same time your experience would not be any better at 10MB/s than at 30MB/s. The value would be if you had multiple devices streaming and doing data intensive tasks. Most people don't need more than 10MB/s or 20MB/s down. Much more than that is just a scam the ISPs sell you to try and get you to pay for something you won't use under a false promise of faster speeds. If you notice lag in streams or gaming and you aren't using all your bandwidth the issue could be in the network latency. This could be caused by a number of things, but in home networks it is often a router issue.
Bandwidth is not how fast data moves, but rather how much data can be transferred in a given time. Think of your bandwidth (i.e. 30MB/s) as a pipe with water flowing through it. If you have this massive pipe (bandwidth) and yet you only need to a trickle of water (Data) does it flow any faster? The answer is no. Netflix on high definition uses roughly 7MB/s, if you were watching a movie on Netflix and browsing the internet at the same time your experience would not be any better at 10MB/s than at 30MB/s. The value would be if you had multiple devices streaming and doing data intensive tasks. Most people don't need more than 10MB/s or 20MB/s down. Much more than that is just a scam the ISPs sell you to try and get you to pay for something you won't use under a false promise of faster speeds. If you notice lag in streams or gaming and you aren't using all your bandwidth the issue could be in the network latency. This could be caused by a number of things, but in home networks it is often a router issue.
