![]() ![]() ![]() Many ISPs are still very tight-fisted about offering upload performance, so you may wind up buying more-expensing plans with far more download performance than you actually need, just to get enough upload bandwidth.Īlso, while we're mentioning upload bandwidth, keep in mind that you may also need it for backups. If your plan doesn't have this bandwidth level, either you're going to need to limit how many family members can Zoom at once, or you're going to need to upgrade your plan. But since so many Zoom meetings and classes require multiple windows open, where participants are looking at mail, other web pages, or notes while in the meeting, assume that you're going to consume some additional download and upload bandwidth.įor a family of four to Zoom simultaneously, figure that you'll need a minimum quoted upload bandwidth of about 20Mbps. But what happens if three or four of you are Zooming at once? All of a sudden, you're pushing a bare minimum of 8Mbps up to your ISP. If you're not doing too much online (even if you have a lower-end plan), you can generally handle a single Zoom stream. Zoom is relatively benign in its bandwidth usage it needs a minimum of 2Mbps down and up (HD requires more). After all, you're downloading other people's video streams while you're uploading yours to the other participants. Zoom uses both upload and download bandwidth. And if you don't, consider getting together with some friends and starting one. My community has a great private Facebook group where members talk about the network performance they're getting and compare notes. Not all communities have a choice of ISP, but if you're aware of the issue, you'll at least know what to ask. The other ISP, a little less expensive, offers cable connections - but those share bandwidth. In my town, one ISP offers fiber, which does not share bandwidth. There's not a lot you can do about that, except possibly switch ISPs. The same limit is true of your ISP's connection to its upstream providers. This is particularly the case during high-usage hours. As more people come online, the amount of available bandwidth may diminish. One other thing to keep in mind is that many cable modem installations share bandwidth among everyone in a neighborhood. If you have three or four people in the house and a couple of them are watching movies while the others are surfing the Internet, you're going to need 100Mbps down, or more. Watching a movie or a YouTube video in glorious 4K will require about 20Mbps of actual download bandwidth.īut that's just for one download stream. ![]() On the other, you'll be looking at the network architecture inside your home.Īs we mentioned, most ISPs optimize for selling download bandwidth. On the one hand, you'll be looking at ISP performance and your plan. As we move forward in our discussion, keep this separation in mind. That means if you have stellar bandwidth from your ISP, but an ancient or obsolete router, you're likely to still have bad performance. Your router controls network bandwidth inside your home. Your ISP controls the network bandwidth between their facilities and your home. Even some of the top-tier packages offered by major ISPs would provide 1Gbps down (1,000 Mbps), but only 35Mbps up.īefore we go on, let's clarify something that seems to confuse a lot of people. You could get hundreds of megabits per second (Mbps) down in a package that only allowed 5Mbps up. Using Netflix, or Spotify etc.ISPs took advantage of this by selling very lopsided packages. ![]()
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