Get the 1Gb/s package and run a Tor exit node. And get a good lawyer.

Web browsing needs maybe 5mbps, you can change the speed in the Firefox F11? F12? Menu and see.

The real test is downloads. How long do you want to wait for a 1GB file?

Start with the cheapest plan.

If you ever find yourself wishing steam installed a game faster, then upgrade to the next best one. See if that feels like enough.

I pay a bit more for 600mbps, but that’s because I have a home server which runs services for friends and family. It might be streaming media, be syncing nextcloud data, and uploading a snapshot to off-site backup, all at the same time, and it needs to do that without hiccups for anyone accessing it. Even then it’s more than strictly necessary. 350mbps would be VERY fast, and enough.

Along with that comes the ability to install small games basically instantly on my gaming desktop, and big ones in the time it takes me to grab a snack, but even the cheapest speed available would otherwise be more than enough for single-person use.

My siblings and mother live on 10mbps home wifi, and they never even complain.

I get like ~80-150mb/s when downing a steam game depending on if my family is home. Never really been an issue, what’s important however is if you get unlimited data because oh my god 1.5tb/m is annoying when you wipe your pc

One thing you consider is concurrency, it’s always good to have headroom if you can.

It’s kinda nice to not have the internet speeds of every device on your network grind to a halt just because you’re downloading something on your computer, for example. Particularly if you live with anyone else using the connection too

As someone who has gigabit, basically the only service that can reliably saturate that is Steam.

Realistically, the right math to do is a ‘how many people are here, and how many 4k streams are going to be watched at once, and how many megabits is that’ since almost nothing else you do is likely to do a sustained saturated use of your throughput for most (read: non-super-nerdy types) people.

Also if you have to ask, then you’ve never noticed and are in that ‘don’t really care’ zone, and you can probably get whatever you want and be fine.

Figuring out your bandwidth requirements is easy but not totally stupid easy.

If you’re going to pull down 4K video on demand figure you’re going to need at least 25mpbs

Now if it’s just you on the network and you never try to do two things at once that would be more than enough.

But now let’s say you were trying to pull down one of those ISOs while you’re trying to watch 4K Netflix. If you know what you’re doing and you can such same limits in your apps you could probably get away with 50 megabit per second. Now if you have a family and multiple people trying to watch different 4K streams, that 25 multiplies.

Now if somebody is trying to be on a zoom call while somebody else is streaming and somebody else’s downloading and ISO, things start to compound and you don’t want the zoom call to suffer. The thing is you’ve got as much of a chance of overburdening your routers capabilities as you do burning through your bandwidth.

Then consider your Wi-Fi, unless you spend a whole lot of money on your equipment you’re not getting any more than around 350 MB per second per device on Wi-Fi. If you’re wired, of course you can eat the whole gig.

A reasonably fast starting point for a small family is probably around 100 mbps.

Steam can give you hundreds of megabits per second but it doesn’t always it depends on where the data is hosted. Torrents can easily saturate as much as you want to give them If you are going after a popular piece of media.

Looking at my internet history for the past 24 hours with four people in the house and one of them almost constantly watching YouTube I had a couple of peaks around 70 mbps My peak utilization over the past 24 hours is about 8% with an average utilization of 2%.

More than likely you are 350 is more than enough to handle whatever you need unless you really need to have very very very large files very very quickly or have more than five people streaming at your house.

I don’t think you’ll be complaining on any of them. Was having gigabit nice? Of course, but 350 is plenty. Most services won’t even transfer that quickly to you and you can run a lot of video streams on that.

But the main way to tell would be if your router has a traffic meter on it since it has all devices going through it. Otherwise if you’re mainly on PC you can use the task manager to see how much is going on and out

Use a speed test site?

Also: depending on the model of your TP-Link router you may be able to flash the firmware to use OpenWRT. My first time using it was with a TP-Link router; it just didn’t have every feature.

Steam and the occasional torrent is really the only time I see anything using my full internet speeds, though. But those are also used for extremely large downloads; many times larger than a streaming video.

You might max out your throughput with popular torrents, else it’s indeed just steam I’m aware of to deliver. And then the question is really whether you download that many games that it actually matters.

Even on my 100 mbit line, downloading 50GB from steam takes me only about 1h. At 350mbit that should be less than 20 min, vs. ~7 min at 1gbps.

Personally I don’t download enough to justify the surcharge, I can easily just let it run through the night, or start in the morning and be done once I’m out of the shower and had my breakfast.

Number of simultaneous streaming connections is probably the biggest factor. For single use, I’d save your money. If sharing with a family or neighbors, may be worth the high bandwidth.

Your modem will likely keep connection statistics which will tell you how much data was downloaded and uploaded.

Ookla speedtest.net will give you an indication of your network speed. I have a cron job that logs the speed with their cli client every 5 hours and I use it to keep my ISP mostly honest.

The resulting data can also be used to map peak network congestion so you don’t end up with network buffering issues when you are watching the latest episode on your favourite streaming service.

I think the easiest would be to downgrade to the 350mbps plan and see if you can even tell there is a difference. If you do a lot of downloading of large files (Linux isos and steam games) those will go slower. Anecdotally, I’m a software developer who works from home and I have never felt an upgrade from my 300mpbs plan to be necessary, but I don’t download a ton of large files very often and this decision obviously takes into account my personal income and expenses.

If most of your traffic is through your computer, you can Ctrl-Alt-Del and open task manager, then there are other tabs where they monitor network traffic. If your network connection is only to the Internet, and not any other devices, this will give you a very good idea of your bandwidth usage.

I have gigabit down, 400 up, and that is actually faster than my WiFi connection.

Can you tether everything to your phone for a day and measure based off that? Small chance you might be able to tether through your router so you don’t have to point everything at your phone.