Within the last month, Shaw unveiled their Fibre+ Gig plan, promising download speeds of 1 gigabit per second, and Telus announced a PureFibre 1.5 Gigabit plan, promising download speeds of, you guessed it, 1.5 gigabits per second. These are the most expensive plans from both service providers, and frankly do not make sense for most people.
First of all, let me talk scale. What exactly is a gigabit? What does that mean? I could go very far into a comparison between bits and bytes, but that isn’t super important for this understanding. Just know that while internet speeds are measured in units of “bits,” generally megabits or gigabit, hard drive storage is measured in “bytes,” commonly gigabytes. A bit is smaller than a byte, and while bytes are the prevailing unit of measure for storage, networking has remained using bits. For our purposes here, the only thing worth noting is that I’ll be talking in speeds of megabits and gigabits, and that there are 1000 megabits in 1 gigabit.
So, how fast is a gigabit per second, exactly? I think the easiest way to quickly demonstrate how fast it is is to use Netflix as a unit of measure. This article From Netflix states that as of the time I write this, a 5 Megabit per second connection is recommended for an HD stream, and a 25 Megabit per second connection is recommended for a 4K stream. 1 Gigabit is 1000 Megabits. Now, after grabbing a napkin (or the Windows calculator), the math tells me that on a 1 Gigabit per second connection, a household could watch 200 Netflix shows in HD at once, or 40 Netflix shows in 4K at once. That is…. A lot of Netflix. It gets even more fun with the Telus PureFibre 1.5 Gigabit plan, where a household could watch 300 HD Netflix shows, or 50 4K Netflix shows. While I may have a lot of devices in my home, I don’t think I could get to 200 screens to saturate that. Not that anyone is doing this anyway but Netflix limits you to 4 simultaneous streams on their most expensive plan, so on the Telus 1.5 Gigabit plan you would also need 12 Netflix accounts to watch 50 4K streams, or a very amusing 75 accounts to watch 300 HD streams. That’s not relevant here but I find the idea of paying for 75 Netflix accounts quite funny. If you are paying for 75 Netflix accounts, I would very much like to hear from you.
So, assuming 40+ Netflix streams isn’t practical, what is this kind of speed actually good for? If you regularly download large amounts of data, and I mean large amounts, these speeds can help. The example most relevant to me is gaming. A big, modern PC or console video game can be in excess of 100GB and the faster your download speed the faster the game can download. On a 1 gigabit per second connection, a game that large can be download in a best case scenario of about 15 minutes. On my current internet connection of 300 megabit per second that would take 46 minutes in a best case scenario. Obviously, the larger the amount of data, the more of an advantage for the faster speed. There are certain workflows where download speeds this high can matter, mostly with high amounts of data being transferred. Those are mostly specialized workflows with specific needs.
Even when it comes to families, or groups of people living under one roof, there are still limits to the benefit of faster speeds. Sure, if there are two people watching Netflix 4k streams, and someone else is trying to download a large video game, the game download will take a few extra minutes, but in general, the vast majority of the time an average household will not be bumping up against a cap of 1 gigabit per second.
Add to all of this the fact that in most of our homes there really isn’t any one device that can use all of that speed by itself. Wired internet connections are almost exclusively a maximum of 1 gigabit per second, so a wired device could not use that 1.5 gigabit per second plan from Telus by itself. Wifi can, in theory, exceed those speeds but in reality, most devices do not. This means that these speeds are only useful if you have many devices in your home that are simultaneously downloading large amounts of content often. Lastly, I’ll just point out that the server/service you are getting your content from also has to be able to send you the data that fast. Many services currently aren’t capable of uploading at 1 gigabit per second, meaning that from a single source you are unlikely to be able to get the full benefit of that speed.
As I’m sure is obvious by this point, I really think that for most households, internet speeds of 1 gigabit per second are unnecessary at this time. That doesn’t mean they will be unnecessary forever. Almost 10 years ago I was quite happy with a download speed of 50 megabits per second, which is just 5% of 1 gigabit, and about 17% of my current 300 megabit per second plan. I wouldn’t want to go back to that speed with my current usage, and I’m sure in a few years I’ll want more than my current speed. But for now, for most people, spending the money for 1 gigabit per second is a waste. As I’m sure is obvious by this point, I really think that for most households, internet speeds of 1 gigabit per second are unnecessary at this time. That doesn’t mean they will be unnecessary forever. Almost 10 years ago I was quite happy with a download speed of 50 megabits per second, which is just 5% of 1 gigabit, and about 17% of my current 300 megabit per second plan. I wouldn’t want to go back to that speed with my current usage, and I’m sure in a few years I’ll want more than my current speed. But for now, for most people, spending the money for 1 gigabit per second is a waste.
Download is one thing, but where some ISP’s lag is on upload speeds. Shaw, for example, offers download speeds up to 1 gigabit per second, but upload speeds are only 25 megabit per second on that plan. That is an upload speed that is only 2.5% of the download speed. While it remains true that most people generally do download more than they upload, upload is becoming more and more important. Between services like photo backups, cloud storage like Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive, video calling apps that are becoming more and more important in 2020, as well as many more people working from home, upload speeds are even more important, and offering upload speeds that are only a tiny sliver of download speeds is becoming harder and harder to justify. Telus, on the other hand, does offer symmetrical download and upload speeds up to their 1 gigabit per second plan. This means that up to that speed, you can upload as fast as you can download. On Telus’ new 1.5 gigabit per second download plan, the upload speed remains 1 gigabit per second. So while that is no longer symmetrical, 1 gigabit per second is more than enough.
So how much speed is enough? Of course that will depend on every individual situation, but in my scenario, with one or two people in the home, my 300 megabit per second download plan from Shaw is enough for me. Would I like a faster speed? Of course, but the only time that really currently matters in my home is when I am downloading a video game. At no other time am I coming close to sustaining any speed close to my 300 megabit per second speed. Upload is another issue entirely. My upload speed is limited to 15 megabit per second, which in 2020 is no longer acceptable. I would strongly consider switching to Telus, however they currently do not offer Fibre to my address, meaning the best internet I can get is 75 megabit per second download speed and 15 megabit per second upload speed. 75 megabit per second download speeds are not enough for my household, and because of that I am stuck with Shaw and their slow upload speeds. My hope is that when I am ready to renew my internet services, one of the providers will step up, and actually serve me what I consider to be an important aspect of the internet. Until then, I live with what I have.