this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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Broadband in most of the developed world is 100Mbps, with South Korea transitioning to 1Gbps broadband. The point is less "what's good enough" and more "evaluating internet access as a required utility".
I live in South Korea. I can get 1Gbps virtually anywhere in the country. I get 2.5Gbps easily.
Same here in sparsely populated New Zealand. Our house in a small rural town of 100ppl has 4Gbps fibre available (only have signed up for 1Gbps) and that's run by a wholesaler, you can choose from 20+ ISPs to provide the service, switching between them takes one call and 30min
My point is, reliability, latency, and consistency is what is important. Bandwidth is nearly totally irrelevant for 99% of internet users. A couple years back I ran an entire office of 100 people on a 50 mbit connection. Thats 100 Concurrent users all using their cloud apps to do work. Many of them streaming music while they're working, some of them are even streaming video while they're working. It was never an issue for anyone and there was always plenty of bandwidth to go around, because bandwidth does not impact user experience unless you are regularly downloading or uploading massive files. Even on windows patch days where there are updates being downloaded for every computer at once it wasn't a problem and nobody noticed.
More megabits does not mean better or more reliable access to the internet. Just like how a 100 megapixel camera that costs $200 is not better than a 24 megapixel camera that costs $1000.
Just to prove my point, I restricted my internet bandwidth to 25/3 on my firewall, which means its restricted for the entire home. Every device on the network is sharing the single 25/3 connection. I started streaming a netflix 4k movie, then opened a youtube video concurrently, then started streaming a random TV show from amazon prime. I opened up another concurrent video YT on my phone and ran that concurrently. That is 3 1080p streams and 1 4k stream and I ran out of screens to test with. Then I started streaming music from spotify and apple music both at once. Then, to top it all off I ran a speedtest. I still had 8mbits/sec to spare and any website I went to was still loading instantly. This is not a hard thing to try yourself and I highly suggest it if you're open to your opinion being changed.