Real world difference from 900mbps to 2000mbps

elrasho

elrasho

elrasho

Soldato
Joined
12 Jan 2009
Posts
6,557
Hello I upgraded my broadband with BRSK for £5 extra a month for more than double the speed.

Thing is my WiFi mesh supports Wifi6 which is 1800mbps and my gaming PC is connected by ethernet on a 1Gbps connection.

So I'm not benifiting from the new speed. My question is: is it worth spending £300 on a WiFi 7 mesh with 2.5gbps ethernet ports and cat 6a cables to take advantage of the new speed?

Will I notice lowering pings in online gaming is the main incentive tbh
 
elrasho said:
So I'm not benifiting from the new speed. My question is: is it worth spending £300 on a WiFi 7 mesh with 2.5gbps ethernet ports and cat 6a cables to take advantage of the new speed?
Click to expand...
You don't need cat6a for 2.5Gbps - it works fine on Cat5e.

elrasho said:
Will I notice lowering pings in online gaming is the main incentive tbh
Click to expand...
No

The main reason for much "fatter" connections, is to be able to do more online at the same time - i.e. more devices. There is generally no "need" to have the whole of your internet connection available to a single device (and in doing so you can cause contention problems e.g. if one PC is downloading at the full 2Gbps speed, and you try and game on another PC - you will likely still experience "lag" due to buffer bloat, unless your router has decent QoS)
 
Would probably hold off wifi 7 for a while anyway
Last I looked simultaneous MLO
Just doesn't really work properly
And as usual the terminology regarding wifi 7
Is confusing
Theres dual band,triple band
Then a lesser version of MLO too
It allows manufacturers to say wifi 7 even though
It may not have all of the features
Or have a lower level of them

Then off course your receiving devices need to
Be capable too
And those will suffer in the same fashion
As the routers do

Sites like dong knows tech do a better job
Of explaining it than I do
 
Multi-gig services in my opinion are either for a really specific use case (remote worker who pushes VM images around all the time, someone who does freelance video editing from home etc. - basically anything where your average file size is 100GB and your local storage is measured in terabytes) or for supporting lots of users. It wasn't uncommon to run an office of 60 people off a 100Mbps leased line five years ago, and it never really caused issues. One of the networks I look after has 40 people working on site, their gigabit FTTP average utilisation during work hours is about 30Mbps, and that is mostly viewing the feeds from some CCTV cameras at a remote location.

If you are an average household the only benefit you'll get from faster services is that a large game update will download quicker. I have a 1.6Gbps EE service and work from home full time, my UniFi gateway reports utilisation at 5% - if I was paying for this connection I'd pick a slower speed.

ISPs are keen to sell multi-gig services as it helps with their marketing and basically gives them extra margin because their costs don't go up by £5 when you upgrade, I'm sure for the majority of people they run a speed test and then struggle to peak above a few hundred Mbps. I'm sure the marketing around the products doesn't help either - TalkTalk currently have a service selection page on their website that claims I should pick 900Mbps instead of 500Mbps if I am an "always-on household".
 
Nice to have high bandwith with gaming handhelds/laptops that struggle to fit many hundred+GB games on their device and like to download them on the fly :D shame I can only get 2.3Gb max on Wifi on the handheld :( though I doubt I could have any faster I don't think the CPU would have the grunt to keep up on a Steam game install, all the cores are mosty pegged right now and that's a Zen 5 Strix Halo running at ~5Ghz :o

For the rest of the time I could have much less, reckon typical use, 500Mb would do.
 
Last edited:
I'm on 1Gb, was on 500Mb before, other than game downloads, it's made 0 difference. Even with downloads, it's not made much difference, half the time, but we are mostly talking 10min for a big game instead of 20. Pings to UK servers barely changed between fttc and fttp. Couple ms difference if that. Not that it really matters these days, a lot of games will just shaft you for low ping to make it "fair" and in the worst cases give bad latency the advantage.
 
I haven't noticed any signficant benefit in faster internet speeds since about virgin 250 Mb days. I recently got fibre. Pings dropped about 10-12ms to european servers compared to HFC. Other than that there's no real difference. Most websites you visit are cached on massive content servers anyway. torrenting can benefit, but even at 1gb Files were downloading to completion before in literally a minute or 2.

The high speed packages are for multiple users. Most regular people don't need any more than 100Mbs to the net in general.
 
Anyone who can truly use multigig (or even 1 gig) will confidently be able to say 'I need it because...'. It's one of those things where if you have to ask, you don't need it. As Armageus and Caged said, if you have a lot of heavy users and are pushing a ton of data off-site (large VM files, backups, video files / CCTV, software, archives, whatever) then you'll appreciate the upload that comes with such a package. If you have a homelab and are pulling and pushing a lot of data (multiple TB a month) then it will be useful in bursts. For a home user, most remote office workers and certainly for gamers, a 100Mb package will likely work just as well but save a chunk of money.

Your latency (ping) is determined primarily by the underlying technology type and your router. A 100Mb package and a 2Gb package on FTTP will have pretty much the same base latency/ping. If latency is your primary concern and you can't articulate why you 'need' 1-2Gbps, then you'd be better skipping the speed upgrade and putting that money towards getting everything on Ethernet or fibre on your LAN, and installing a proper router with real QoS (CAKE, fq_codel) and tuning that so that you avoid bufferbloat. I run VyOS on a mini PC (EQ12) with CAKE and push (and pull) 5-10TB/month easily, with 1.5ms latency to my servers 50 miles away in Manchester (effectively making my backups/pulls 'LAN') and a dropped packet rate of only 0.000009% for SQM after 10TB of transfers. I can be down or uploading a massive data set at ~1.8Gb/sec and the other five people in the house will be on a LAN party with 2ms ping and no issues. My DNS servers also report no latency spikes. My point is, I could have achieved those same latency sats on the 100Mb package too - the bandwidth/speed is a separate consideration to the latency.
 
To illustrate my point it turns out when I wrote my reply my EE 1.6Gbps connection was actually running at 50Mbps and I only noticed on Sunday when I read about the issue.
 
I know I don’t need 1Gb, I'm just on it because community fibre seem to position it as default. If I could get 500Mb for half the price of 1Gb (£24), I would downgrade.

More speed=better for gaming, is all the isps fault. Adverts going X speed for superfast gaming and then showing people playing online with WiFi.
 
elrasho said:
my gaming PC is connected by ethernet on a 1Gbps connection.
Click to expand...
"ASUS Z690-PLUS D4" that board is listed as having a 2.5Gb LAN socket so you should be able to use the full bandwidth unless you have got a 1Gb switch sitting between your router and PC.
 
NetMan said:
"ASUS Z690-PLUS D4" that board is listed as having a 2.5Gb LAN socket so you should be able to use the full bandwidth unless you have got a 1Gb switch sitting between your router and PC.
Click to expand...
Yes my Deco X20 mesh are all connected via 1Gb LAN cables so I'd have to upgrade them too to benefit. I've decided to leave it as it is.
 
Always my dilemma. Pay for more bandwidth but end up utilising it less because the downloads happen so fast :)

Now being offered 2300mbps for only double the cost of 500 mbps! I'd be happy with 250 mbps but next step down is 100 mbps.
 
elrasho said:
Yes my Deco X20 mesh are all connected via 1Gb LAN cables so I'd have to upgrade them too to benefit. I've decided to leave it as it is.
Click to expand...
Do you mean you are using a 1Gb switch between the router and your PC or you are plugging your PC into one of the Deco x20 as a wireless bridge rather than it being hardwired directly to the router?

Because 1Gb lan cables don't exist in that sense yes Cat5e was originally rated for 1Gb but 2.5Gb is designed to run on cat5e cabling; so if your PC connects directly to your routers 2.5Gb port via cat5e it should connect at 2.5Gb.

I have no idea how many 2.5Gb ports your router has so thats worth checking in case just one of the ports is 2.5Gb and its not the one going to your PC.
 
NetMan said:
Do you mean you are using a 1Gb switch between the router and your PC or you are plugging your PC into one of the Deco x20 as a wireless bridge rather than it being hardwired directly to the router?

Because 1Gb lan cables don't exist in that sense yes Cat5e was originally rated for 1Gb but 2.5Gb is designed to run on cat5e cabling; so if your PC connects directly to your routers 2.5Gb port via cat5e it should connect at 2.5Gb.

I have no idea how many 2.5Gb ports your router has so thats worth checking in case just one of the ports is 2.5Gb and its not the one going to your PC.
Click to expand...

I cant do that its two floors down and wife wont be happy. The idea was to run 2.5G cables from ROUTER > DECO x20 (front room) > DECO X20 (landing) > Gaming PC but cba tbh

Currently using Cat5e but my X20 Deco have 1Gb ports so they are the bottleneck
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom