As the title states.
Both myself and my parter are avid gamers.
All 4 kids are also gamers, but watch Netflix etc. too and with our current connection, all is fine.
Our main concern is that we both are remote workers and work from home, anything that throttled our internet connection would become unsustainable to us.
Some sites say that 70mbps is pushing it, but should be okay, others say it’s completely untangible
Any advice is greatly appreciated
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.
Don’t forget if work has a VPN the speeds will be slowed even further! My wife and I both have VPN for WFH… we have Xfinity 1200D/40U and she is constantly complaining her video calls are dropping. We test speeds when she is not on VPN and (wirelessly) she gets around 300D/20U but then we connect to her works VPN and it suddenly goes to about 80D/7U. When I wirelessly am on VPN I get 130D/20U.
No downloading during business hours 😁
Maybe set up a small server on the network that can act as a cache, like steam cache for example.
Caching proxy server.
Yeah and turn off cloud connected home video cameras. Video upload is horrible at that connection speed with 6 users.
Why are to looking to go from 500 to 70?
Cost? Moving house and this is all that there is?
I think the key would be to have good QoS, though I’m not really sure what to buy for that. A lot of consumer routers claim to have it, but idk how good it is.
Given it has decent ping and upload, I think You will be fine.
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.
What’s the upload speed? Your video calls depend a lot on upload speed. ad well as latency.
Also anything that has a file sync component may be of concern, my line of work requires hundreds of pushes a day that needs to happen nearly instantaneously as others’ workflow depends on my response time.
I would not want to do that. One game update and the whole connection is struggling. Xbox/PS5 downloading something in standby? Not fun.
One game update and the whole connection is struggling
What are you smoking. Ive run a 60mb connection for 10 years and been fine with multiple things downloading.
It’s a contention network, not guaranteed. Look to your neighbors… Or maybe, of you are lucky, your router is overheating.
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.
Don’t do it
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.
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.
Setup QoS and listen to everyone else complain, moving from 500 to 70 is not something I would recommend since you usually don’t even get the advertised speed.
Take a look at the Firewalla router with its QoS features. Properly setup, I think you could do it.
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.