Home Servers - Internet Speed for Online viewing

[Owner]

Megabits (Mbps) vs. Megabytes (MB/s)

Windows11 tells me that my internet speed is (Receive / Transmit) 1,000 Mbps

A byte (B) is a group of 8 bits.
1 Mbps (megabits per second) is equal to 1/8 MB/s, or 0.125 MB/s (megabytes per second).

Megabits are used to measure wired and wireless speeds (Mbps).
Megabytes are used to measure storage capacity and how fast storage devices transfer data (MB/s).

What Internet speed do home Media Servers need to provide streaming viewing as oposed to remote viewers just downloading for off line later viewing.

[TheDreadPirate]

Windows is only telling you the local connection speed. You need to use something like https://librespeed.org/ to test your Internet speed.

Technically any Internet speed can provide offline downloading. Just depends on how patient you are.

How much Internet bandwidth you need depends on your media quality, number of users, etc. For a single user, 10-20Mbps is probably the minimum for a decent video watching experience.

[Owner]

W11 report is misleading as speed test shows only 27 Mbps down, and very poor up of only 4 Mbps.

So up is serving i assume, so no streaming!

ISP will give slightly more speed if pay more, but only 100mbps down tops in theory, and about 10 Mbps up, it appears ISP's don't want people to stream?

[TheDreadPirate]

Windows 11 is only reporting the LAN connection speed. Not the Internet connection speed.

If you lower the quality, 4 Mbps should work for a single 480P stream.

Every ISP is different. In some areas here in the US, it is common for people to have 1 Gbps down AND up. But not everywhere. My ISP is a cable Internet provider and most of their plans only have 10 Mbps up. I had to go up to their most expensive 1.2 Gbps download plan just so I could get 40 Mbps up.

[bitmap]

Windows 11 is only reporting the LAN connection speed.  Not the Internet connection speed.

If you lower the quality, 4 Mbps should work for a single 480P stream.

Every ISP is different.  In some areas here in the US, it is common for people to have 1 Gbps down AND up.  But not everywhere.  My ISP is a cable Internet provider and most of their plans only have 10 Mbps up.  I had to go up to their most expensive 1.2 Gbps download plan just so I could get 40 Mbps up.

Feel this in my soul. Next place I move, symmetrical fiber is on my list of what I'm looking for...

[Deleted User]

suddenly i feel lucky to have 10GBit on a 100G backbone

[Owner]

In Australia our Optical Fiber National Broadband Network (NBN) was superposed to give us 1000 Mbps / 1000 Mbps.
But a quick check shows that is not widely available.

Many plans only offer 1000 / 50 with a statement that the 1000 down may not be achieved at peak user evening times.


But the undersea cables that connect Oz to USA and Asia run at 40-50 Tbps / 40-50 Tbps or so they tell us.
Whats the point when the cables reach land the speed drops to slow retail 1000 Mbps

[bitmap]

I'm in the same boat of 1200/30, which is the most expensive residential plan and costs extra to remove the data cap. Not only do we have worse speeds, they've created artificial scarcity by limiting total data usage which is anti-consumer no matter how you look at it. Business plans are available for 2-3x as much as I pay for this plan, which introduce symmetrical options, but even those are not always symmetrical.