First, the units
ISPs sell internet in megabits per second, written Mbps. Eight bits make a byte, so 100 Mbps gets you a download ceiling of about 12.5 megabytes per second — written MB/s. A gigabit connection (1,000 Mbps) tops out around 125 MB/s. The difference matters when you see a "10 MB/s" download in your browser and wonder why your 200 Mbps plan looks so slow. It isn't. 10 MB/s is exactly what 80 Mbps of usable throughput looks like, and most single-source downloads never reach the full link rate anyway.
The other unit users mix up is gigabit (Gb) versus gigabyte (GB). A 1 Gbps line is 1 gigabit per second of bandwidth. A 12 GB game download moves 12 gigabytes — about 96 gigabits total. At line rate that takes roughly 96 seconds in theory; in practice, far longer, because the game server hands you bits more slowly than your ISP can deliver them.
What each activity actually costs
These are the per-stream bandwidth requirements published by the vendors themselves, the FCC broadband guide, and the methodology audit in the StabilityPulse about page. Each row is one concurrent instance — one person doing the thing — not a household total.
- HD video streaming (1080p): 5–8 Mbps down. Netflix, YouTube, Prime.
- 4K video streaming: 15–25 Mbps down. Netflix UHD asks for 15 minimum; in practice you want 25 to absorb bitrate spikes.
- Video calls (Zoom, Teams, Meet): 3 Mbps each way for 1080p group calls. Meet's official minimum is 2.6 Mbps before it falls back to lower resolution.
- Online gaming: 1–10 Mbps each way during active play. Gaming is almost never throughput-bound — latency is what matters, and that lives in the stability layer, not the speed tier.
- Cloud gaming (GeForce Now, Xbox Cloud): 25 Mbps down for 1080p60, 45 Mbps for 4K. Wired connection strongly preferred; cloud gaming over Wi-Fi is fragile.
- Live streaming (Twitch, YouTube 1080p60): 3 Mbps down, 8 Mbps up. Upload is the constraint.
- Cloud security cameras (per cam, 1080p): 2 Mbps down, 4 Mbps up, continuous. Five cameras add 20 Mbps to your upload need without anyone watching.
- Active game or app download: saturates the link briefly — typically 100+ Mbps if the source server can deliver it. This is the only activity where a higher tier directly buys you time.
- Browsing, email, social, music: negligible. A few Mbps each, peaky and short.
The household math, worked out
Real households don't do one thing at a time. The trick is estimating concurrent peak — the worst minute of a normal day, not the worst minute imaginable.
Notice what's missing: nobody in any of these households needs a 1 Gbps plan. The 300 Mbps tier covers everyone with headroom to spare. Higher tiers exist for a reason — large game downloads, power users with heavy cloud backup, households with five or more concurrent heavy users — but those are exceptions, not the norm.
Symmetric vs asymmetric: why fiber 100/100 often beats cable 500/25
Most cable plans are asymmetric: a large download number paired with a tiny upload number. A typical cable 500 Mbps plan ships with 20–35 Mbps upload. Fiber plans tend to be symmetric — the same number both ways — and the symmetry matters more than the headline download number for any household that does live video calls, cloud backup, security cameras, live streaming, or cloud gaming.
The reason is mechanical. When you're on a Zoom call, both parties are uploading at the same time. When your phone backs up to iCloud overnight, it's uploading. When a Ring doorbell records a clip, it's uploading. A cable plan that gives you 500 Mbps down but caps upload at 25 Mbps will hit that ceiling fast, and once it does, your downloads slow too — TCP requires acknowledgement packets to keep flowing in the other direction.
A fiber 100/100 plan rarely needs to manage that tension. The 500 down looks impressive on a marketing page; the 100/100 feels better in actual use.
The hidden hardware cost of higher tiers
ISPs don't usually mention this: plans above 1 Gbps need hardware that most homes don't have. The new tier itself costs twenty dollars more a month, but the gear required to actually use it can run $150–400 upfront and isn't optional.
- A 2.5 GbE or 10 GbE NIC on the device that wants the speed. Most desktops, laptops, and game consoles ship with a 1 GbE port, which caps wired throughput around 940 Mbps no matter what plan you're paying for.
- A router with matching WAN and LAN ports. Plenty of mid-range routers still cap WAN at 1 Gbps even when their internal switching can do more.
- Wi-Fi 6E or Wi-Fi 7 if you want anything close to multi-gigabit speeds over wireless. Older Wi-Fi 5 hardware tops out around 600 Mbps in real-world conditions.
- Cat6 or Cat6a wiring for any wired runs expected to carry over 1 Gbps. Cat5e usually works at 2.5 Gbps for short runs but isn't guaranteed.
The honest version of a 2 Gbps upsell sounds like this: "$20 a month more, plus $250 in hardware you have to buy and install before you see any of it." If the ISP doesn't say that out loud, the calculator above will at least flag it in the recommendation card.
How to read ISP pricing tiers (and spot the value-trap tier)
ISPs publish their tiers in a deliberately specific order. The middle tier is almost always the trap. It exists to make the tier above it look like a steal.
A real example: an ISP listing $15 for 75 Mbps, $30 for 100 Mbps, and $40 for 400 Mbps. The middle tier — $30 for 100 Mbps — is engineered to look bad on purpose. You're paying double the cheapest tier for 33 percent more speed, while the top tier costs 33 percent more than the middle for four times the speed. The marketing math pushes you to either the cheapest tier or the top tier, never the middle.
The honest read: pick the cheapest tier that actually covers your need from the household math above, or the tier with the best dollars-per-megabit ratio if you genuinely want headroom. The middle tier is never the answer.
Most homes don't need more than 1 Gbps. The community already knows.
Browse any thread on r/HomeNetworking that asks "what speed do I need" and the answers converge. The community is unanimous: 300 Mbps is the sweet spot for most homes, 1 Gbps is the ceiling beyond which marginal improvement disappears, and anything above 1 Gbps is for specific workloads or peace of mind, not for general use.
One thread put it plainly. A self-identified network engineer described a household that includes heavy 4K streaming, continuous cloud backup, multiple security cameras, and two adults working from home full-time. Their connection: 1 Gbps synchronous fiber. Their assessment: they never saturate it.
ISPs sell higher tiers because the margin is better at the top, not because the average household needs them. Calling that oversell isn't unfair — it's what the community calls it when someone shows up in a forum with a 2 Gbps plan asking what to do.
Throughput is half. Stability is the other half.
Picking the right tier solves one problem: you stop overpaying for capacity you don't use. It doesn't solve the other problem, which is whether the line you've picked actually delivers clean packets when you need them.
A 50 Mbps line with low jitter, low packet loss, and stable latency under load will hold a Zoom call all day. A 1 Gbps line with bufferbloat — latency that balloons under load — will drop the same call inside ten minutes. The two failure modes are independent. The Mbps number tells you nothing about whether you're in the second category.
Once you've right-sized the plan, run the stability test to check the other half. The test takes about 35 seconds and measures the metrics that actually predict call quality: jitter, packet loss, loaded latency, and bufferbloat. If those come back clean, your tier is doing its job. If they don't, no upgrade in the world will fix it — the problem is somewhere between your device and your ISP's gateway, and that's a different repair.