How much broadband is enough for your home? 100 trillion, 300 trillion, or gigabit—after settling these three accounts, there's no more obsession

cousin's new home renovation broadband is pushing gigabit at the service hall, costing 20 yuan a month. He called me to ask if it was worth it. I have plenty of authority to say about this—I've used 100 trillion, 300 trillion, and gigabit before, and even wasted money. This article breaks down three accounts, so after reading it, you'll know how much your home should install.

first translate '兆' into human language: how fast can 100 megaby downloads be

the "zhao" mentioned by carriers is Mbps, which is converted to the familiar download speed in MB/s, divided by 8. So, the theoretical download for 100MB broadband is 12.5MB/s, 300MB is 37.5MB/s, and gigabit is 125MB/s.

just looking at the numbers doesn't make sense, so I used downloading a 2GB movie as an example: 100MB takes two and a half minutes, 300MB takes just over a minute, gigabit takes 17 seconds. The pattern emerges: going from 100 to 300 means "going from having to wait to not waiting"; Going from 300 liters of gigabit is "from one minute to a shorter minute." The marginal feeling of the money behind it diminished very quickly.

there's a common confusion: this is the family-wide shared main pool, not each device gets 100MB exclusively. Your TV, phone, and computer combine to get this pool—whoever uses it takes it, whoever grabs it takes it.

there's an easy factor to overcalculate when calculating: the IPTV set-top box provided by the operator. It operates on an independent multicast channel, doesn't crowd the broadband pool, and no matter how much you watch TV, it doesn't count up trillions. But the Xiaomi Box and other OTT boxes you bought yourself are different. They run WiFi and internet traffic, and even 4K can consume 25MB. When my home calculates occupancy, Telecom IPTV is crossed out and not counted; only the old Xiaomi box in the living room is recorded—this is the only difference that many people miscalculate from the start.

First Account: Occupancy per head, see what the whole family is doing at 8 p.m.

bandwidth is sufficient, not during the day, but at the moment when the whole family is busy during the evening rush. I've listed the bandwidth usage amounts for common uses, all based on actual measurements: 1080P short videos have 5 to 8 megapixels, 4K online sources around 25 megapixels, kids live streaming online 3 to 5 megapixels, WeChat video calls 1 to 2 megapixels. The most counterintuitive part is gaming—online play itself doesn't consume 1 megabyte of energy; what it wants is stable latency, which basically has nothing to do with bandwidth. Don't spend gigabit just to play games; that would be spending money on the wrong ledger.

for my family: at 8 p.m., my wife watches 4K on TV for 25 megapixels, my mom watches short videos on my phone for 6 megapixels, and my kids take up 4 trillion for online classes. I just grab whatever I have left while updating on Steam. The first three are fixed at 35 trillion, and normal concurrency for three people is around 40 trillion. 100 trillion is barely enough, and 300 trillion is steadily leaving some room to go. That's why I say 300 trillion is the "enough and confident" dessert segment.

When will 100MB hit its peak? Back then, my husband and I would one watch 4K TV and cast to a 4K concert. Both stacked 25MB, plus the phone's background automatically updated their albums, pushing it up to over 90MB, and the screen started spinning. In short: 1 to 2 people, no 4K TV, no downloads, 100MB is easily used; If you get a second 4K screen at home, it costs over 300.

second account: Gigabit is a matter for FamilyMart's equipment, a weak point is all for nothing

this lesson was learned with real money. In the first year of upgrading to Gigabit, my desktop with a network cable tested at 122MB/s without issue, but my wife's phone was only 50-60GB. After searching for a long time, it turned out to be an old WiFi 5 machine, with a negotiated speed of 867Mbps. It looks high, but in reality, the maximum bandwidth is 500-600Mbps—this weak point in phones has cut off nearly half of the gigabit broadband.

to run Gigabit at full capacity, every link in the entire link must be Gigabit: the optical modem must be plugged into the Gigabit port. Many optical modems only have network port 1 for Gigabit and IPTV ports for 100Mbps, but if plugged in, it drops to 93 Mbps ( the article I wrote about distinguishing between optical modems and gigabit ports have a comparison table); Wall network cables must have all eight cores fully connected, while four-core wires are only 100 Mbps (pay attention when wiring crystal connectors ); The router's LAN port and the switch in between all require Gigabit ( switch purchase don't be tempted by the cheapest 100Mbps); WiFi specs for phones and computers also need to keep up. I calculated the ceiling for WiFi 5 negotiations at 867 in the of spatial streaming. Any link is 100Mbps, so you're paying a thousand megabits to run a 100Mbps network.

there's an even more hidden layer: WiFi itself is a weak point. Even if you and your phone both use WiFi 6, after negotiating speed drops across a wall, the actual throughput of the 5G band is generally only about 600 to 700 Mbps. Gigabit broadband running fully on wireless devices is basically impossible. If you really want to experience that 122MB/s thrill, you need a network cable. That's why NAS users and downloaders end up punching extra holes in the wall.

so before upgrading to Gigabit, I first checked out my home devices—old routers, old phones, old TVs, and a whole bunch of them. Upgrading them is basically a way to pay the carrier.

the third account: ads only hype you down; upward is the hidden pitfall

When

service halls promote gigabit, they only say "fast downloads" and never mention uplinking. Home broadband uplink is seriously unequal: 100Mbps package uplink usually gets 20 to 30 Mbps, 300Mbps gets 30 to 50 Mbps, and what about gigabits? Most regions only reach 30 to 50 trillion, with a few first-tier cities reaching 100 trillion. In other words, if you upgrade to Gigabit, downloads triple, and uploads basically stall.

these things all depend on upstream traffic: live streaming (1080P streaming is recommended to go above 20MB), video chatting with parents on WeChat, uploading home surveillance footage to the cloud, remotely connecting to the home NAS to drag files from public IP ( the public IP article has covered this remote route), and having your phone photo album on auto-sync cloud storage counts as one of them. My NAS has been stuck around 4MB/s for external network access all year round, and it's locked by 30MB uplink, which has nothing to do with whether it's gigabit or not.

really need a big upward connection, just ask the service hall if they have special plans or enterprise broadband—it's much more effective than mindlessly going to gigabits.

my real experience after using it: 100 liters to 300 is a qualitative change, 300 liters to Gigabit is almost imperceptible

to give a subjective conclusion: when the 100 went up to 300, FamilyMart never had the conversation of 'Pause for a moment, I'll watch the video card'—this was a qualitative leap; After 300 liters of gigabits, except for me who download large files faster at night and wired wired transfers to the NAS ( discussed this topic the internal network speed boost), no one else at home noticed switching broadband.

to put it bluntly, Gigabit profits are concentrated on two groups: those who frequently download large files, and those who have NAS and multiple devices at home using wired intranets. For ordinary households watching videos, taking online classes, or playing games, there's a gap between 300 Mbps and gigabit that you can't even notice.

Taking the Fact: Choose according to this chart, don't waste money

the money: Gigabit costs 200 to 300 yuan more per year than 300 Mbps, which doesn't seem like much, but three years is a decent router. My suggestion is to install 300Mbps first. After half a year, you'll find it's really not enough (late-night speed tests always stick to the package value, and it's really laggy). It's not too late to go up—upshifting is easy, downshifting is hard. Carriers can't wait for you to keep up. I've written about how to negotiate prices when changing a plan in , and I've paid for three carriers in this .

Wrap up with a clear order: first count how many people in the family you have, what you do at 8 PM, then add up the number of concurrent megabytes; Double-check the specifications of the optical modem, network cable, router, and phone; With the numbers on both sides clear, the number of trillions to install naturally becomes clear. After installation, first check the speed test article run a round of speed tests to feel more confident.