With the advent of technology in the field of communication, the speed of information transfer has reached a new level. Fiber optic cables are capable of providing crazy data transfer rates. It often turns out that high speed is unjustified and costs extra money. It is important not to fall for the marketing of providers and decide what you need.
In order to take into account all the nuances when choosing a tariff for the Internet, you need to know a few facts about the principles of the network, which will help you use the services more efficiently.
1 Mbps is about 8 times more than 1 Mbps. It turns out that having an Internet speed of 8 Mbps, we get a real speed of about 1 Mbps. A 5 MB music track will be downloaded (or completely downloaded) in 5 seconds. Thus, knowing your needs in the network, you can calculate the time it takes to complete this or that task at the current tariff.
Its performance is influenced by the most important factors, for example, network equipment, the speed of the remote server, the level of the wireless signal, the speed of the end device, etc. If your provider proudly claims 50 megabits per second, then watching a movie online, you may simply not get that speed, because that computer with the movie is somewhere far away. The server is loaded with the distribution of this movie to several thousand, or even tens of thousands of the same users.
This is comparable to a wide pipe through which a small stream flows: the source (server) is no longer able to give, and all the extra space is empty. A similar situation arises if you are with a tablet through 2 walls and a layer of furniture from a router - the speed of the Wi-Fi channel will drop, and no matter how fast the Internet comes to your house, it will reach the device at other, lower speeds.
In fact, ping is the speed of access to data on the Internet, i.e. how fast the request goes. If at high speed the ping is large, then there will be practically no sense from it: requests will be slow. Large ping has a particularly negative effect on ordinary web surfing, where every mouse click is a request, as well as on online games, where the synchronization of what is happening in real time depends on the ping.
… If everything is not so important with music, tk. Since the sizes of the compositions are small, then with the video you should always pay attention to the quality in which you watch it. The higher the quality, the slower the buffering (loading) of the movie or video clip. For example, 480p quality requires almost half the speed compared to 1080, although many reputable sites automatically set video quality, so the problem has become less significant.
Here computers of users act as a server, and the speed of information transfer to your computer is summed up for all servers. As a result, the overall upload speed can be very high, capable of loading any Internet channel.
Considering all these factors, the following recommendations can be made.
- about 5 Mbps will be more than enough for surfing the web and listening to music at the same time, and the Internet channel can share several devices with such tasks
- 10 Mbps can provide uninterrupted playback of FullHD video on 2 devices, and on the third one you can quite comfortably browse the pages
- 20 Mbps is already a serious speed that will allow you to watch a FullHD movie with simultaneous torrent download, and you can still safely hang up your phone with a tablet on the channel and watch Youtube comfortably. For correspondence and web surfing, the speed is excessive.
- 40 mbps. Old routers simply no longer support such speeds. Needless to say, 40 Mbps is enough for everything. It can only be recommended to users with special tasks, such as an FTP server or working with files in cloud systems. You should not take this speed if you are just listening to music, chatting on the Internet and sometimes watching a movie. This will be an overpayment.
- 60 Mbps and above. Yes, currently some providers offer such numbers, and they are really needed very rarely. It happens that the provider promises even 100 Mbps and higher at night, but to maintain this speed you need expensive powerful routers and "gigabit" cables. Almost all mobile devices will not be able to open at this speed, and a computer needs either an expensive motherboard with a 1000mb network card, or a gigabit network card.
Taking into account the average statistical requirements of Internet users, in modern conditions, an Internet speed of 15-20 Mbps is sufficient for almost all tasks. More often than not, large numbers mislead users, as if promising that "everything will be fast." But providers know very well that only a quarter of the same 60 Mbps will be used, so in fact they are delivering 15-20 Mbps for a price of 60. Most often, the difference is felt only when working with torrent clients, but for most users it is hardly worth the overpayment.
