Gadgetory

these days your options for high-speed internet start at just a few megabits per second and go all the way up to gigabit speeds or even more now of course the ISPs want you to fork over as much of your money as possible for a higher speed connection with vague wording about how it's good for gaming or multiple devices or what-have-you but how much should you really be paying for well here's the thing part of the reason that Internet service providers offer so many access tiers is that not everyone needs the same size pipe coming into their home you shouldn't buy a 10 seat minivan if you're single with no kids and in much the same way it's probably a waste to have an insanely fast internet connection if you live alone with one computer and a phone this means the $64,000 question when choosing an internet plan is what are you using the service for and how many gadgets will be accessing it at once after that the process mostly becomes a matter of simple addition you see it turns out that predicting how much speed each common task requires is fairly straightforward suppose you want to stream HD video and I would assume you do otherwise you probably wouldn't be watching this for sites like YouTube and Netflix you'll need between a 5 and 10 megabit per second connection if you want your experience to be reliably smooth now of course if you want to stream 4k or HDR your data rates are going to be quite a bit higher most of the popular streaming platforms recommend anywhere from 15 to 25 megabit per second and we would suggest going a fair bit higher than that somewhere in the 40 to 50 megabit range this will account for any dips in your service speed during heavy load times or if a Windows Update is running in the background somewhere the thing to keep in mind though is that this is on a per video basis so if you wanted to stream on more than one screen you need to multiply that speed times the total number of videos that you forsee your household playing on your connection at once that way your tech quickie stream won't cut out because you're inconsiderate roommate is trying to watch his rebooted 90 sitcoms in 4k next we got to consider our other data heavy doings beside streaming video like gaming it might surprise you though to know that you don't need insane speeds to have a great gaming experience in fact typically if you can have at least 10 megabits per second free on whatever device you're gaming on it'll probably be enough the more important consideration for gaming is going to be latency now you can learn more about latency up here but in short it's the delay between your computer or your phone requesting something from the server and the server sending the data back to you and vice versa and it's actually possible nay common to have a service that boasts high speeds but also suffers from high latency which can result in weird leggy behavior while you're gaming and the really tricky thing here is that as you pay more for a higher speed tier your latency may not improve at all so if you have several ISPs to choose from read reviews and see if there are any in your area where gamers have specifically recommended it for its lower latency also keep in mind that low latency is equally important for other real-time applications such as video chatting with your long-distance love interest one more gaming and video chat specific consideration is that unlike web browsing it's important to make sure that you're getting a decent amount of upstream speed for these applications a solid 10 to 15 megabits per second per device should be fine for high quality video calls and streaming to twitch in high definition now aside from applications the other most common reason that you might want a faster connection is if you are often transferring large files like game installers or large video files for example if you are trying to download a 2 gigabyte movie that would take about 2 minutes and 40 seconds on a 100 megabit per second connection so it's a simple matter of doing the math for how long it takes you to prepare a bucket of popcorn and going from there finally although I know the title of this episode is how much speed you need we should probably also mention data caps those are those nasty little limits that some ISPs slap onto your service where if you exceed a certain amount per month you'll be looking at consequences like throttling or extra charges now data caps shouldn't be too much of a concern for web browsing but you can quickly run up against them if you're gaming streaming or watching a ton of video so have a look at this chart to see how much data per hour these activities usually consume and then you can use some quick math to see how high of a cap you might need every month the bottom line is that there's no point overpaying for either speed or data that is unless you're that person that likes to leave your Wi-Fi unsecured because you're just feeling really generous towards your whole neighborhood so hopefully you found this video helpful speaking of helpful brilliant is all about helping you get just a little bit smarter every day they published several daily challenges that provide a quick and fascinating view into math logic science engineering or computer science and it's daily that means every day so whether you're stuck in a commute or just want to learn something new brilliance daily challenges are a fun bite-sized way to master concepts by applying them each challenge comes with illustrations animations or interactive visualizations and includes all the context that you need to solve it for yourself so if you want to actively learn new fascinating concepts each day head over to brilliant dot org slash tech quickie we're gonna have that linked below and finish your day a fair bit smarter see my talking points say a little bit but you also watch tech quickie so you get extra credit for that the first 200 of you to do so are gonna get 20% off brilliants annual premium subscription so you can view all of the daily challenges in the archives and unlock their dozens of problem-solving courses so thanks for watching guys like dislike leave a comment if you have a suggestion for a future fastest possible video and don't forget to check out our other videos so you don't miss any of our other videos and subscribe to hit the bell because it's important you know