Asklemmy

It depends… you say several times “I”. So yeah if it is just you, 55 is likely fine.

If you are the only one, watching something, then yeah likely you’ll be fine

A single 1080p Netflix stream will consume about 4Mbps.

If you just stream music and media and browse the net, that's an easy way to benchmark. If you're gaming, higher speeds will not increase performance of online gaming - this requires quite little and depends more on latency (satellite/star link vs cable/fiber etc). The higher speeds will only help with more concurrent users or game/media downloads (if you pirate media, for example).

I'm not an expert but I think you should be fine on the lower one. My understanding is that most plans wildly overemphasize what you need for an activity. Like they'll say the most expensive one is for gaming but in reality the cheap one would work completely fine for a single person.

I used to have 55mbps and I never had any issues. You won't be downloading huge games in minutes but just plan ahead and you'll be fine.

I've been gaming and streaming most of my life with sub-30mbps download and sub 15 upload speeds, didn't have symmetrical 50+ until a year ago.

As others have said, you have to plan ahead. If you need to download something large, let it be and go do something else while it does its thing. Streaming high quality on two screens or more is doable but you'll buffer eventually.

You can probably set up some rules on your router to prioritise whatever device you deem most important, however. Although, if its important enough to warrant a rule on your router, it would probably be better to just plug an ethernet cable in anyway.

DSL is the only thing available-outside of Starlink--in my area. My service is rated at 25Mbps. For almost everything it's fine. It will take most of a day to download a PS5 game, but it's fine for streaming video.

55mbps down will be enough when lower cost is most important. it's about the download speed we have at the office (55mbps), and at home too (faster but network gear is slower than the pipe coming in, so 55-60mbps is what i get on the main pc).

we can have a remote desktop going with multimedia coming through that (for work; low bitrate but latency matters), 2-3 hd streams, a couple screens on web sites, something downloading a huge batch of updates, an online 'shooter' game being played, and still not worry about loading up something else to use some more.

for straight downloads from servers and cdn that can handle it, expect 2-4 minutes for a typical linux iso download, and for big downloads about 25 gigabytes per hour max.

You'll be fine on 55mbps. That's what I was on for the last decade in Denver. Has no issues with bandwidth in my household.

hoping to start a community intranet as the internet sucks and is shit nowadays

I started on a 50Mbps plan which was a massive upgrade from what Comcast offered at the time, so I was pretty pleased with that. At one point I noticed something dragging down my connection, and found signs of people attacking my servers. That was easily dealt with, however what surprised me was the speed of the traffic I was seeing. After blocking the attack I pushed up my torrents and realized I had been upgraded to a 100Mbps connection and didn't realize it (I really do love my local provider!).

So yeah, for general web browsing you probably won't notice any difference between those two speeds. If you are downloading specific content then of course the downgrade will take twice as long, and as others mentioned it shouldn't affect your streaming speeds at all.

I don’t think it’s necessarily horrible but with slowest WAN speeds it might be worth it to set up a DNS caching server and potentially caching proxies for whatever services you use (this used to be easier for generic HTTP before encryption).

For example, macOS has Content Caching for caching Apple software updates. You can also cache repositories for several Linux distributions, Docker, stuff like that too.