
When you scale the size of the download back though, the differences become less significant. Even with a gigabit connection, you’re often bottlenecked by the remote server. Let’s put a big emphasis on the “ideal conditions” bit, by the way. Under ideal conditions, it would only take around 13.5 minutes to download your game. By contrast, on a gigabit connection (1000 Mbps) the maximum sustained download speed would be around 125 MB/s. So to download a 100GB game, it would take around 2 hours and 15 minutes under ideal conditions. To translate your advertised internet speed into actual download speed, divide it by 8 to convert bits to bytes.) (The reason it’s not 100 MB/s is that your internet speed is measured in megabits and data storage is measured in megabytes.

On a 100 Mbps connection, you can expect a sustained download speed of around 12.5 MB/s. Most AAA titles these days are massive and routinely weigh in at 100+ GB. Let’s say, for example, that you have a 100 Mbps internet connection and you want to download a new game. For the vast majority of people, purchasing the highest tier of internet service available to them, especially if that’s gigabit speeds, is overkill. If you read that bit above about how a gigabit connection could stream 4K to a dozen or more devices in your home without strain, you might have thought “But I don’t need to stream 4K to every single room of my house, that’s silly.” And it is silly. Calculating Your Household’s Bandwidth Needs Monkey Business Images/ It’s just extra bandwidth you’re not using-but paying for the privilege of keeping on perpetual standby just in case. If you need 5 Mbps of bandwidth to enjoy a smooth and stutter-free HD video stream, having 500 Mbps doesn’t make for an exponentially improved experience. There is an upper threshold to how much bandwidth any given activity is going to use. With a gigabit fiber connection, you could likely stream 4K video to TVs in every single room in your house, plus all the handheld devices, and still have some bandwidth to spare.įurther, before we leave this section, it’s important to emphasize that more bandwidth doesn’t make a less-demanding bandwidth activity better. You just don’t need that much download speed to stream video. And what you might think is a high bandwidth activity, like streaming video, isn’t actually particularly high bandwidth in the grand scheme of things.
