How fast does my wireless internet have to be?
Looking to set up internet service at my new apartment. How many KB or MB per second do I actually need? I don’t do any gaming or anything too fancy, just want to be able to surf – even to content like youtube – without having to go get a cup of tea…
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What kind of router are you using? I think the generally decent speed is around 54kb/sec.
You will be fine with either cable or dsl. I suggest using cable if you do not have a land line. To use dsl you need to pay for a phone line, and then add the dsl service to that line. Having these bundled together is cheaper than using cable. If, like at my house, you don’t use a land line get cable. It is a little faster.
Another note: be aware of bits verses bytes. Internet providers rate their speeds in bits per second, and your computers calculates downloads in Bytes per second. Say a service is advertised at 5Mbps, your actual download speed will theoretically max at 640 KIiloBytes per second (which is pretty darn fast). But don’t settle for anything less than 128 KiloBytes per second download.
AT&T offers basic dsl at 768 Kbps…but they push the higher 1.5 and 3 Mbps speeds pretty hard. They’re offering a 2wire “Gateway” modem/router along with the faster plans. I don’t have a land-line phone but my apartment is wired for one…
The US average Bandwidth is 1.9Mbps…54kb/sec as mentioned above is for dial-up..
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