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.
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.
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.
Setup QoS and listen to everyone else complain, moving from 500 to 70 is not something I would recommend since you usually don’t even get the advertised speed.
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.
Why are you lowering your speeds. Even with very good QOS you are pushing it.
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.
What’s the upload speed? Your video calls depend a lot on upload speed. ad well as latency.
Also anything that has a file sync component may be of concern, my line of work requires hundreds of pushes a day that needs to happen nearly instantaneously as others’ workflow depends on my response time.
It’s a contention network, not guaranteed. Look to your neighbors… Or maybe, of you are lucky, your router is overheating.
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
That’s going to be pretty constraining. I don’t think you necessarily need 500 most of the time, but 70 is just to little for 6 people at once.
Most of the time, you’ll probably be fine, but there will definitely be times where your network gets so congested that your video streams and gaming performance will suffer.
This is even worse if you’re moving to something like a wireless connection, where packet loss is going to be worse, or a satellite connection, where latency will be higher.
Bro, youre not gonna stream anything. I did this. I went from cable to dsl and back to cable after a week cause the 25-50mb dsl was garbage.
I think the key would be to have good QoS, though I’m not really sure what to buy for that. A lot of consumer routers claim to have it, but idk how good it is.
Take a look at the Firewalla router with its QoS features. Properly setup, I think you could do it.
You’ll be fine. I’ve lived in a house of 5 (student housing), all pretty big gamers, on a ~68mbps connection (UK broadband sucks). It was completely fine most of the time, with some occasional lag when a couple other people were doing bandwidth heavy things (like torrenting or downloading Steam games).
Perhaps in your router you could set QoS rules to prioritize traffic to your work machines during work hours.
70Mbps fiber is prob fine.
The problem is going to be something like video calls or VPN if anyone starts a large file download, like a game install or something if they don’t throttle it. It will eat up most of that and cause issues with anything that is sensitive to download speed/latency. It will still prob work, but you will notice quality drops. Video streaming is likely fine, 10-15Mbps per person is doing ok for that typically.
70Mbps on a non-fiber line, it will suck badly. The upload is likely pretty low, and using most of your upload will crash the download speeds and kill VPN connections and video calls. Not to mention 70Mbps on non-fiber is advertised ‘max’ speed, actual ‘guaranteed’ speeds could be half or lower and when I worked for an ISP there was zero guarantee’s on latency or occasional packet loss which will murder VOIP, voice calls, and VPN connections.