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I'm looking to get an internet connection for my place (I have been using work, school and coffee shops) and I'm wondering how much bandwidth I really need to do different kinds of things? Google turns up lots of stuff but more than 1/2 are for servers and none of the rest give a "To do A you need X Mb" list. I'm looking for a general answer but, merely as a for example, what about streaming video from hulu or reasonably painless (aka HTTP limited by something I don't control) downloading of large files?
I can say for sure that an OC-48 (the 2.5Gb up-link that my University had) can give you all you could ever want and then some. OTOH they need $.25M in new hardware to get it up and running and the targeted-at-students apartments that went in had some kind of 10Gb link so who knows :). – BCS – 2010-04-26T01:20:23.463
Yeah, but I don't think I could handle that much bandwidth. I'd be too tempted to torrent everything. :) – Josh K – 2010-04-26T01:37:47.887
Ahhh. Torrents. The bane of IT. I knew the guy who set up the filtering and he said that if they didn't restrict torrents as far as they could (to zero where they could) there wouldn't be room for anything else :) – BCS – 2010-04-26T01:52:29.703
1Torrents suck bandwidth by nature, even when you try and limit them they flood the routers IP lookup table with requests. Hundreds of peers per torrent will kill just about any network setup bar commercial routers and switches with some very specialized settings. – Josh K – 2010-04-26T02:52:36.617
30mbps should be plenty for 1080p. YouTube 1080 is somewhere around 8mbps average, with higher peaks. – derobert – 2013-01-27T06:54:07.027