Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Is my internet speed enough??

GelleCC

GelleCC

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 13, 2008
182
0
Seattle, WA
I moved in to the apartment right next door to my brother. He and his roommate and my roommate and I would like to share our internet and tv bill (whoo college and finding cheap things!) Now my question is what is a good internet speed for us? We have 4 laptops (only one macbook :/ ), two ps3's and 3 smartphones that will be using wifi.

I went to those "speed test" sites to check my download and upload speeds. One said Download was 22.48 Mbps and the other said 22.56 Mbps. Upload was 2.77 Mbps and 2.92 Mbps. So pretty close to each other. We have comcast TV and internet. Is this a good enough speed for all of us? I'm afraid that if we have All four laptops on and ps3's and phones, it might get slower. Should we get more bandwidth? The better question is would it be worth it to get a higher download speed? No one uses their laptops to play games, so we will just be surfing the web and hypothetically, doing some downloading...by some I mean a lot.

Thanks in advance!
 
well if you guys download things like hypothetically speaking gigabyte movies, if someone is using a nwz bin it will take all bandwidth. Unless you set a speed. Comcast has new speeds, can you guys get the 50mbps? The higher the better but you have to see if you guys can afford it. Me and my buddy are waiting for comcast to roll into our building or fios. I want something like
 
fios would be great, unfortunately, they decided they didn't want to come out to where we live lol. And I thought 20 mbps was alot, but I was looking into it and 20 mbps is megabits per second, and not megabytes per second, right? So 20 megabits is really like..less than 3 megabytes per second because the whole 8 bits to 1 byte thing?

I looked at the 50mbps and it is affordable, but i just don't know if it would be worth it. Right now, we can play both ps3's online just fine (someone said we were lagging, but one person only). So we can do that fine. But what if, hypothetically speaking, someone was downloading a 2 gig file and we wanted to play both ps3's in the meantime? Would that affect anything?

Thanks!
 
If you are all streaming HD movies, playing online with the PS3s, and using your phones at the same time it might slow down. Id say 20Mb is plenty. Things will download so quick you wont even notice.
 
Let's put it this way, on 7Mbps DSL I can stream Netflix to 3 devices (MB, iPhone, Wii) and download a torrent at the same time with no problems. 22mbps is plenty. You probably won't even get close to using that much.
 
GelleCC said:
fios would be great, unfortunately, they decided they didn't want to come out to where we live lol. And I thought 20 mbps was alot, but I was looking into it and 20 mbps is megabits per second, and not megabytes per second, right? So 20 megabits is really like..less than 3 megabytes per second because the whole 8 bits to 1 byte thing?

I looked at the 50mbps and it is affordable, but i just don't know if it would be worth it. Right now, we can play both ps3's online just fine (someone said we were lagging, but one person only). So we can do that fine. But what if, hypothetically speaking, someone was downloading a 2 gig file and we wanted to play both ps3's in the meantime? Would that affect anything?

Thanks!
Click to expand...


yes 20 megabits per second, it translates to around 2.5 megabytes. If someone was downloading a 2gig file, depending on the program they are using most of the time it will cap your speed. So the other things that are using the internet will be reduced to whatever is left. IF you guys can get a program that can cap the download speed then that would make 20mbps doable. But at the same time that download will take longer. I say go for the 50mbps.

If I could get 50mbps I would do that, right now I use my mac mini as an home theatre center and everything I hypothetically download, goes strait to plex and ready to watch on my LED TV as soon as it's done. But with an 8mbps connection a 7gig download takes about 3 hours still.
 
there's two kinds of thought here:

One: 20 mbps is enough and im okay with waiting a couple hours for something to finish downloading.

Two: SPEED MORE SPEEEEEEED

Internet nowadays is not expensive, if you guys can afford 50mbps do it!
 
You should have plenty of bandwidth

...though if you wanted to make things really slick you could get an old Linksys wireless router from ebay, flash it with the right version of dd-wrt (http://www.dd-wrt.com/site/index) and set up Quality of Service. With QoS you'd be able to give each device a limited share of bandwidth, and prioritize certain things (say, ps3 and skype) so that they always work well. A system like that would keep everyone happy and prevent one person with a torrent file from hogging the entire connection.

http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Quality_of_Service
 
Thanks for all the help! Now that I know it's enough, I don't think we are going to go for 50mbps. Even though it would be better, We really don't care if what we may or may not be downloading takes a couple hours.

Thanks!
 
Dude, I manage with 2mbps!!!!! Internet providers don't like us here in Puerto Rico...
 
I get around 15-20 MBPS, but out of the other 3 in my family, I'm the only one who uses the Internet a lot, so I'm not sure how other speeds on other computers are affected when I'm downloading a torrent...
 
My old roommate (years ago) was a serial torrenter......on wifi with dialup. He had a computer that he consistently added things to torrent. Weeks later, it would only be a fraction of the way through. I would constantly disconnect him because I couldn't even check email. ahaha
 
Lol. A serial torrenter. Sounds familiar. I'm the only one who will be doing most of the torrenting..if I did that sort of thing... But if I did it, it's only movies that I would be getting for my other roommates/neighbors. So, the big thing is just being able to use the internet and ps3's while one computer is downloading something. And sounds like 20mbps is going to be fine for that considering I don't download things very often.

On a side note, has anyone been having difficutly buffering youtube videos? Occasionally, I'll go to youtube and I can watch things just fine while on few occasions, it just takes forever to watch a 1 minute clip. I'm sure it's on youtube's end, because I did a search on google and it showed several people having the same problem.

Thanks for the help about internet!
 
When I used to houseshare, the biggest problem was maxing the upload capacity when using bittorrent. Be sure to turn on a max upload speed in your torrent client. When your upload is maxed out then your down speeds drop significantly too (almost to a crawl).
 
20 Mbps?!? I'd love to have that speed. Mine's currently 3 Mbps, and I have a feeling it's going to stay maxed out once I get the new :apple:tv and start streaming NetFlix. I may have to convince the wifey to bump it up to 6.

samiwas, wow. WiFi dialup? And trying to torrent on it? Just... wow.
 
dXTC said:
samiwas, wow. WiFi dialup? And trying to torrent on it? Just... wow.
Click to expand...

Yeah, this was back in 2003/2004 with an original Airport Base Station...they had phone jacks. And this was before widespread hotel wifi. So the only way we could get online was dialup. And if we both wanted to be on...WiFi it was!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back