Guess I’m losing touch…

[notte0]

A couple days ago, a colleague told me to check my home internet plan and that apparently the ISP is doing some sort of promotion. We were paying a certain price, for unlimited data at 150M (whatever that means). The promotion now is for loyal customers, the baseline is 5 years of subscription (we've been subscribing since the internet started) and

Comments

[meathiel]

Damn technology, eh? There's always something.

[amw]

I am going to guess the "M" is for "Mbps", which is a measure of bandwidth. Back in the early days of internet it seemed like a really big deal to get from the "K" into the "M", but to be honest from my end I haven't really noticed much of an improvement after 1.5Mbps, which was enough to unlock reliable video calls and streaming. I just tested my connection now and apparently it's around 15Mbps 🤷 That's shared with all the units on my floor so it might max out at more than that if nobody else is online, but I can comfortably do everything I want to do online - and I'm a very active internet user!

The only use I can really see for over 150Mbps is if you are streaming multiple really high quality (4K) videos at the same time. Or if you are downloading a massive AAA game like Starfield, which for me I left downloading overnight but maybe with a 600Mbps you could download it in an hour or so? But... yeah like you said, faster connection to the internet means you now also need a faster router to make use of it, plus older client devices (

[notte0]

I don’t mind your long explanations because you write in such a way that I actually understand what’s going on!

Yes, after the whole change, I figured it wouldn’t have mattered whether we upgraded or not, but what’s done is done, and we weren’t going to pay anything extra anyway. It’s actually helped that we’ve trimmed down the number of devices (got rid of the Apple AirPort) and I managed to reset the printer and add it back directly to the WiFi network (instead of the AirPort “hub”). The new router that came with the upgrade seems to be able to reach further through the apartment as well, so that’s a boon, I guess.

I guess I’ll have to watch more Netflix and do it at the same time as my Sis is watching Netflix on her TV and Dad going on Skype to talk to his brothers LOL.