Home Networking

If I understood right, you're downgrading your connection from 500 to 70Mbps, and the question is whether this will be enough for six people?

I'd say it depends on to what degree all six of you will be doing bandwith intensive things at the same time.

For example, Netflix recommends minimum 15Mpbs for a 4k stream, so if all six of you will be doing that on separate screens at the same time, you'll be about 20Mpbs short. But if everyone is on 1080 screens you'll be fine as the requirement is 5Mpbs per stream.

Remote work doesn't necessarily require a lot of bandwidth, although it depends on what you actually do for work. MS Teams for example only requires about 2Mpbs for group video calls.

Most gaming also doesn't require a lot of bandwidth, but of course downloading games and their updates does.

Will it work? Yes I think so, though you may encounter times when it gets laggy.

You’ll be unhappy.

Why are you downgrading? Call the company and see if they have any specials for like 2 years at a reduced cost for the 500Mbps

if everyone is at home and using their devices, you will notice issues. if the work and the gaming/netflix are done at different times it can be done with little issues.

I wouldn't skimp... imagine a world were your boss, partner and your kids are screaming at you because thats were this is headed.

Upload speeds are a very relevant part of this. My connection is 150mbps down but only 20 up and it’s great for downloading but I can barely manage a single 1080p/60 stream for remote access/gaming when I’m away from home.

Given you’re dependent on internet access for remote work, I’d be investigating higher bandwidth options because it sounds like a recipe for frustration. Imagine having a child home sick and having to negotiate their Netflix time because it’s causing issues with important virtual meetings… it might be fine, but do you really want to find out at the most inconvenient time?

Is there any way to supplement this connection with an LTE connection? Most prosumer+ routers should be able to combine WAN connections.

I'd also suggest hardwiring as much of the hardware as you can - you wouldn't have losses inherent to WiFi and since it is quicker, less potential for overall slowness since download tasks would complete quicker.

I would not want to do that. One game update and the whole connection is struggling. Xbox/PS5 downloading something in standby? Not fun.

it depends on usage patterns honestly. You didn't mention any single activity that would really struggle on a 70/70 Internet connection. The issues would start when you run 3 Netflix streams and a zoom call while patching your game library. 4k Netflix is about 25 mbps on average.

QoS and traffic shaping is the best way to manage this kind of situation.

Make sure that real-time (latency sensitive) traffic has priority, or even just do something as basic as throttling certain ports/devices on the network.

Just keep in mind that you've mentioned the download speeds, but upload is something to consider as well.

Worst case scenario, keep mobile data on your smartphone as a backup.

Why downgrade? Is it significantly expensive?

It depends if it’s cable or dsl, typically one video stream @ 1080p will be around 5-7 Mbps download only (no upload). Video conferencing will require same upload.

Online Video gaming doesn’t require a lot of bandwidth (ie. 1Mbps) but because of latency, works far better on a wired Ethernet connection than wireless.

70 is fine for the most part. Think of each person consuming about 5-10 Mbps each at most.

4K streaming can shoot up to 20-25 Mbps. That’s on a 4K tv with a 4K stream.

Why are to looking to go from 500 to 70?

Cost? Moving house and this is all that there is?

I live in a 6 person house. 70mbps just for myself is already frustrating, any person who downloads a game without putting a download limit will hog the whole bandwidth causing the internet to be unusable.

Use a router with Cake SQM (or other good QoS) and configure it correctly, on both upload and download. In my experience, managing multiple sites, this is a life saver.

Latency increases dramatically when the connection is loaded at or near capacity.

You want extra headroom to ensure everything works smoothly.

10 years ago I managed my family network: 17 devices, 25/5, some used streaming, some navigation, me low latency games. Had this old TP-link with dd-wrt, set QoS 95%/85%. NOT A SINGLE SLOWDOWN.

So yeah, you can do it.

Youll be fine. Gaming will depend if your ping is high but you cant do a whole lot with that. What Id be most concerned is while gaming, getting bufferbloat due to heavy network use from things such as downloads that will take longer.

Bro, youre not gonna stream anything. I did this. I went from cable to dsl and back to cable after a week cause the 25-50mb dsl was garbage.

Why don’t you check your current router usage? Start recording the peaks and lows of how much data you’re consuming at once. I think that would be the easiest way to find out if it’s doable without changing how you guys are using the internet.

It won't be enough. The second you start watching a couple of netflix streams at 4k your connection is going to be nearly at capacity and unless you have some sort of effective qos on the router you're going to suffer potentially from bufferbloat - increased latency which will make gaming agony

My place of employment has an 80 Mbps upload / 80 Mbps download fiber optic connection, with approximately 150 users. The network works fine, but the network hardware is good, enterprise-class hardware: Fortigate firewall, Cisco routers, Brocade managed switches, and Extreme Networks WiFi access points.

Sure, no one is downloading games over the network, although there are a lot of software updates, but they are doing extensive YouTube and Netflix streaming, etc., and our supposedly tiny 80 Mbps connection handles multiple 2K streams without issue, and without lag or hiccups.

The first most important thing our network does beyond typical consumer hardware is traffic shaping, Quality of Service, and traffic prioritization. There simply isn't any reason why software updates, downloads, and media streams need to have low latency, but it is critical that interactive processes get high priority. ASUS routers have some of these functions, but a router distribution such as pFSense, OPNsense, or OpenWRT, running on PC hardware will do it better than simple consumer models. Consider the "prosumer" class Omada or UniFi product lines as well.

Small but frequent critical infrastructure traffic such as DNS and clock synchronization is centralized on the network, so that each and every device is no longer getting that information from over the Internet, but from a local server, and our firewall enforces that, redirecting or blocking attempts to bypass the local server. Many Windows and Google updates are also locally handled by a server, so these updates gets downloaded only once.

I am on a 80/20 max service and get around 70/15 usable bandwidth. There are two of us in my house, and we both work remotely and are on video calls a lot. We have had no issues. But, we are 1/3 the size of your household and not gamers :)

You’ll be fine. I’ve lived in a house of 5 (student housing), all pretty big gamers, on a ~68mbps connection (UK broadband sucks). It was completely fine most of the time, with some occasional lag when a couple other people were doing bandwidth heavy things (like torrenting or downloading Steam games).

Perhaps in your router you could set QoS rules to prioritize traffic to your work machines during work hours.

Bruh if you have 500 keep it. If it’s because you’re moving, find a different provider.

Probably depends on the ISP, but we had a 40Mb DSL connection all through Covid with two adults working remote and a couple of kids streaming YouTube all day and we never noticed any issues. I was surprised, but everything seemed to work fine.

I have a family of 5 and I can tell you it's not going to be fun.

Number one thing is that no one is going to announce what they are doing at the time, so bandwidth usage is going to be all over the place.

Add on the fact that every device in your house will download/upload randomly depending on what applications those devices have on them.

You're essentially giving everyone 10Mbps download and I'm going to assume sub-1Mbps upload.

That is a big nope.I'm a specialist at work and support everything.

I get calls with people with less than 30 having all sorts of issues working remote, single users, no smart home devices, no file transfers happening, only person in the house.

Since Covid, we can support 1500 people remotely. We have spent on new Cisco switches, and remote appliances and enough bandwidth to support everyone. Everyone with higher speed does not have an issue.

Also don't be someone remote also connected on wifi. This does not help VPN one bit. especially with only an ISP provided router.

If you work from home with that connection speed, your ONLY course of action is to hope you have a local desktop at work on their gigabit network that does all the work, while you manipulate it remotely, which requires the minimum amount of connection.

IT blows my mind when people go home with their laptops, and work on huge excel documents full of macros, and need access to share drives to accomplish their goals.

What could take them 10 minutes here at work will be 2.5 hours remotely. Add another VPN user at home and a bunch of kids with various streaming/gaming needs and it'll be horrible. Trust me.

Those are up-to speeds. You'll likely get less on average. From my experience, expect as much as 20% slower speeds than advertised on most days.

I personally wouldn't downgrade to 70Mbps. Maybe if they have an option between, that may be better if you're trying to reduce monthly costs.

You also may run into upload speed issues as others have said, though that may not change between the two packages you mentioned. With my local ISP(s), you get the same shitty upload speeds for all packages except 1Gbps.

Your mileage may vary.

UHD and Dolby Vision content will easily sap 55Mbps in chunks. Hopefully you have a decent router to apportion it fairly. I'm not saying it'll be unusable, but you will probably get some slowdowns or dips in video quality.

Set Netflix to HD only (No 4K) at least for everyone elses user account maybe even set them to 720p, get a router with good QOS and you might be ok. Upload is also pretty damn important for the work from home aspect.

You will need to QoS the heck out of work vs personal, as a single twitch stream can take up to 10Mbps down.

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Also plan on getting less than 70, as they talk in legal speak. Your speed is "up to 70Mbps" and not "is 70Mbps".

That's going to be pretty constraining. I don't think you necessarily need 500 most of the time, but 70 is just to little for 6 people at once.

Most of the time, you'll probably be fine, but there will definitely be times where your network gets so congested that your video streams and gaming performance will suffer.

This is even worse if you're moving to something like a wireless connection, where packet loss is going to be worse, or a satellite connection, where latency will be higher.

Why are you lowering your speeds. Even with very good QOS you are pushing it.

Gaming requires latency. Streaming 1080p requires 5mb down Steaming 4K needs about 25mb Zoom 1080p requires 2mb up and down Security cameras could use 1-2mb up

The important for zoom is uploads. If you have cable with 10mb up, you could struggle. If it’s 70/70 you should be ok.

Add a 2nd internet service that is work only with your computers hardwired. Long story, but we have three services at our house.

it's possible if suspend big game downloads between business hours, start the big downloads at night for example like we did in the 90's with 56K/ISDN/DSL.

You mentioned 70mbps download, but what is your upload bandwidth? It's often surprisingly terrible.

After a month of terrible internet connectivity, I noticed issues occurring when a particular device was turned on. After investigation, I spotted the issue was being caused by Microsoft OneDrive saturating my upload bandwidth. The issue caused problems with download and upload on all devices connected to the network.

People and ISP marketing focus on downloads but in reality it's important to focus on upload to the same degree as download.