real world difference between fibre 500mbps vs 1gbps

Henry Ng

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For 500mbps plan means that your gateway (ONT) for all devices at that point can have connection up to 500mbps.. shared among all devices.

If all the wireless clients are actively uploading & downloading at the same time each wireless clients may have different connection speed.
But in total it cannot be exceed 500mbps.

Each wireless clients, unless all same models, may not be able to achieve 500mbps or even 300mbps, unless with latest/high-end models.

To put it this way, non of these wireless clients may even achieved close to 100mbps as streaming may need about 25mbps max depend on resolution.
Even surfing do not reached that high connection speed.
Agree. For wireless no point getting 1Gbps.
 

MoyoCase

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Agree. For wireless no point getting 1Gbps.

for wired its worth it . cos u see nowadays routers like Asus come with USB port for plugging in devices directly to download stuff like torrent or files inside the router. WHich mean direct wired connection . in that case 500 mbs will be slower by half time vs 1GBPS. Correct me if i am wrong.
 

giraffey

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for wired its worth it . cos u see nowadays routers like Asus come with USB port for plugging in devices directly to download stuff like torrent or files inside the router. WHich mean direct wired connection . in that case 500 mbs will be slower by half time vs 1GBPS. Correct me if i am wrong.

Download speeds are often dependent on the remote server. The remote server either limits the download speed per connection or it also has a network speed limitation (considering that the servers are also accessed by many others).

1gbps would probably be more useful if there are a number of high bandwidth users/devices.
 

badsector

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for wired its worth it . cos u see nowadays routers like Asus come with USB port for plugging in devices directly to download stuff like torrent or files inside the router. WHich mean direct wired connection . in that case 500 mbs will be slower by half time vs 1GBPS. Correct me if i am wrong.

what's the speed you could achieve using the router's downloader tool?
 

Teo Ming Ern

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Given our experience with work from home and home-based learning, if everyone is doing online video calls, then I think 1 Gbps is definitely worth it lar... many families have to stream video calls for father and mother at work, then 2 kids with online lessons... pretty taxing since most of the devices would be on wifi... hence having more headroom might be helpful as long as the router can support higher speed wifi access.
 

-Grift-

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Given our experience with work from home and home-based learning, if everyone is doing online video calls, then I think 1 Gbps is definitely worth it lar... many families have to stream video calls for father and mother at work, then 2 kids with online lessons... pretty taxing since most of the devices would be on wifi... hence having more headroom might be helpful as long as the router can support higher speed wifi access.

More like bottleneck is with the Wifi setup and not the 500mbps/1gbps uplink :s13:
 

xiaofan

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One good thing about using 500Mbps is it us easy to saturate the link with wireless connection, using a decent AC router or cheap WiFi 6 routers.

On the other hand, it was not easy to saturate the 1Gbps link with wireless AC routers previously, as majority of the clients are only 2*2 80MHz with the theoretical max speed of 867Mbps and lower practical speed of around 500-600Mbps at close range with a good router. Now with WiFi 6 clients being more common (AX wireless adapters are inexpensive for PC and Laptop) and the cost of WiFi 6 AX routers going down, it is finally not difficult to get 800Mbps+ speed. So 1Gbps is kind of finally "worth" it in this aspect.

On the other hand, this 500Mbps or 1Gbps speed refers to the internet speed, not your internal network. Majority of the server's, especially outside Singapore, can not sustain 500Mbps anyway. So 500Mbps is more value for money in this aspect. And take note streaming 4K UHD Netflix only needs 25Mbps, so you are unlikely to saturate the 500Mbps bandwidth with working from home plus home based learning. The issues are not really with the 500Mbps plan, but rather with the home network setup or the servers (Zoom, Skype, Google Meets, Microsoft Teams, company VPN servers, etc).

As for within the home network, there is no issues to use AX routers to get faster wireless connection speed with the home (800Mbps+) with 500Mbps plan, for example, to get fast speed from the NAS, because you are dealing with the intranet or internal network here.
 

xiaofan

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For myself, I did not see much differences after upgrading from SingTel 500Mbps to 1Gbps.

On the other hand, for people downloading a lot of stuffs from the internet (eg: large Linux ISO files from fast mirror severs), 1Gbps may still be worth it.

Same for people with lots of devices connecting to the internet, or running some types of servers from home network, 1Gbps plan or higher plan may be worth it.

In particular 1+1Gbps plan may be good for people who want to have a high speed 1Gbps dedicated connection to the PC and then the other 1Gbps to the rest of devices.
 
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javierlee30

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Is the wifi speed really depend on 500mbps or 1gb or just buy top end wifi mesh router for 500 mbps will do?
 

xiaofan

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Is the wifi speed really depend on 500mbps or 1gb or just buy top end wifi mesh router for 500 mbps will do?

If you use speedtest, of course the results will be limited by the WAN/internet speed which is 500Mbps.

But no worries, you can still buy good wifi routers for your 500Mbps plan, to have better wifi coverage and speed.

1) WAN/Internet: connection outside your home network, speed will be limited by the ISP plan you subscribe to.

There are no differences to most of the people between 500Mbps and 1Gbps, because most of the international websites can not sustain 300Mbps (or even 100Mbps), let alone 500Mbps.

Video streaming does not normally require higher than 50Mbps (Netflix 4K requirement is 25Mbps).

Online gaming requirement on bandwidth is even lower than streaming but latency is more important.

Use case for faster ISP plan: upload YouTube video to Google YouTube. But 500Mbps plan is also not too bad compared to 1Gbps plan.

2) LAN/Intranet/Home network: connection within your home network, speed will not be limited by the ISP plan. No one will stop you from using 10Gbps within your home network even if you only have 500Mbps ISP plan.

Say you have 1Gbps based home network, your wifi speed will mostly limited by the 1Gbps LAN port in the home network. But that is fast enough. And you need good wireless routers to achieve near 1Gbps speed. Coverage is often more important than speed. A good wifi mesh can help here.

Example use case: copy video editing files from PC/laptop to NAS in the home network. Faster LAN and wireless speed are useful.
 

i-Movies

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if you have rapidgator premium account, download manager speed can easily hit 60MB/s which almost uses all 500Mbps bandwidth.
 

giraffey

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Is the wifi speed really depend on 500mbps or 1gb or just buy top end wifi mesh router for 500 mbps will do?

It really depends on your use.. Some reasons why a higher end wireless router/mesh may be suitable:
- There is a network NAS or file sharing across devices within the home network
- There is quite a number of devices using WiFi, especially when users have multiple mobile/laptops and IoTs. Some Wifi Routers and mesh systems performance is affected when you have more than a few devices connected to it.
- Top End Mesh systems sometimes provide better range, better speeds when connected to the satellite (i.e. tri-band models dedicated wifi backhaul)
- Of course, depending on the brand, some brands have more features or their mesh capability is better.
 

XiaoFu99

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if you have rapidgator premium account, download manager speed can easily hit 60MB/s which almost uses all 500Mbps bandwidth.
I'm getting about 40+ MB/s with M1 500Mbps with premium rapidgator.

I suspect if I'm on 1Gbps plan, can hit even higher but maybe not 80MB/s. And also the filesize play a part as well. Too small cannot enjoy the speed.

Sent from Samsung SM-G965F using GAGT
 

southmountain

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1GB is really useless.

1. Even AC router claiming 2xxxbps, hardly get up to 1GB for single connection. the connection speed depends on many factors. even if your devices support wifi 6, the distance also affects and may not reach 1GB speed.

2. Most of the 2.4GHz devices with Theoretical Speed at 300mbps could only work at 150mbps. Most of 5GHz devices with Theoretical Speed at 900-1.7Gbps could only work at 450mbps to 1Gbps. but how many devices using 5GHz connections?

3. Even if all of your devices works at full speed, how much data do you really need for downloading or online collaboration?

4. If you are downloading HD movie every day at full speed, you can get each movie in less than 10 mins. but you need to spend 2-3 hour to watch. how many hours you have to watch movie comparing with the time you have to download movie?

5. If you are watching youtube HD, 5Mbps connection is more than enough for 1080P streaming. if you have 10 pax watching 1080P youtube at the same time, 50Mbps is enough.

6. If you are playing online game, it does not require high bandwith, but you need to have low latency. buy an high end gaming router is more worthful than subscribe to 1GB gaming plan.

7. look at most business broadband speed. they offer much higher price for much lower bandwidth. but would the business usage lighter than home with so many people working at the same time?
 

Henry Ng

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1GB is really useless.

1. Even AC router claiming 2xxxbps, hardly get up to 1GB for single connection. the connection speed depends on many factors. even if your devices support wifi 6, the distance also affects and may not reach 1GB speed.

2. Most of the 2.4GHz devices with Theoretical Speed at 300mbps could only work at 150mbps. Most of 5GHz devices with Theoretical Speed at 900-1.7Gbps could only work at 450mbps to 1Gbps. but how many devices using 5GHz connections?

3. Even if all of your devices works at full speed, how much data do you really need for downloading or online collaboration?

4. If you are downloading HD movie every day at full speed, you can get each movie in less than 10 mins. but you need to spend 2-3 hour to watch. how many hours you have to watch movie comparing with the time you have to download movie?

5. If you are watching youtube HD, 5Mbps connection is more than enough for 1080P streaming. if you have 10 pax watching 1080P youtube at the same time, 50Mbps is enough.

6. If you are playing online game, it does not require high bandwith, but you need to have low latency. buy an high end gaming router is more worthful than subscribe to 1GB gaming plan.

7. look at most business broadband speed. they offer much higher price for much lower bandwidth. but would the business usage lighter than home with so many people working at the same time?

It actually depends on how many devices the user have and for what use. For work use I am getting 450 Mbps download and 3000 Mbps upload speed for my internet via Office VPN. Quite fast. For homehub user there is no different in term of price for 1Gbps so may as well take 1Gbps speed.
 
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ZrE0_Cha0s

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It actually depends on how many devices the user have and for what use. For work use I am getting 450 Mbps download and 3000 Mbps upload speed for my internet via Office VPN. Quite fast. For homehub user there is no different in term of price for 1Gbps so may as well take 1Gbps speed.

3000 mbps on 1gbps speed :s22:
 

bert64

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It actually depends on how many devices the user have and for what use. For work use I am getting 450 Mbps download and 3000 Mbps upload speed for my internet via Office VPN. Quite fast. For homehub user there is no different in term of price for 1Gbps so may as well take 1Gbps speed.

For home working, what capacity does your company VPN have?
If your VPN is into an office, business internet tends to be more expensive and slower peak speeds than home use. Many offices have 100mbps or less, and that will be shared amongst all the users. Even if your company hosts infrastructure in a data centre, will it be 1gbps? 10gbps? And still shared between multiple users.
Even if their line is high capacity, how about the VPN server? What capacity can it handle?

I have a lot of colleagues home working in various countries, a lot of them are on <10mbps connections and manage to do fine. Video conferencing works fine, voice calls work fine, all their day to day activity is fine. Transferring large files takes longer, but that's not a common operation and can always be left to run in the background while you do other stuff.
 

xiaofan

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For home working, what capacity does your company VPN have?
If your VPN is into an office, business internet tends to be more expensive and slower peak speeds than home use. Many offices have 100mbps or less, and that will be shared amongst all the users. Even if your company hosts infrastructure in a data centre, will it be 1gbps? 10gbps? And still shared between multiple users.
Even if their line is high capacity, how about the VPN server? What capacity can it handle?

I have a lot of colleagues home working in various countries, a lot of them are on <10mbps connections and manage to do fine. Video conferencing works fine, voice calls work fine, all their day to day activity is fine. Transferring large files takes longer, but that's not a common operation and can always be left to run in the background while you do other stuff.

I am working for an US MNC. My company VPN (using GlobalProtect) used to be pretty slow but now it is pretty fast, just did a Speedtest (Viewquest test server) when connected to the Hong Kong based VPN server, ping is 69ms, download is 165.84Mbps and upload is 115.46Mbps.

Interestingly I have faster connection at home than at work with company wifi network. Occasionally it can be a problem with dropped Microsoft Teams meeting with the company wifi network but seldom I have dropped connection this year when working from home.

But yes the VPN connections can still cause problems if too many people are using it. Then it is better to drop the VPN connection as there is no need to use it when just using Microsoft Outlook and Teams.
 

xiaofan

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It actually depends on how many devices the user have and for what use. For work use I am getting 450 Mbps download and 3000 Mbps upload speed for my internet via Office VPN. Quite fast.

For homehub user there is no different in term of price for 1Gbps so may as well take 1Gbps speed.

450Mbos download and 300Mbps (I think you meant to say 300Mbps and not 3000Mbps), that is impressive.
 
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