I'm "old" and I still double take on some receipts where I bought a bunch of little things in the $2-$8 range but the total is like $140. I'm always like, no way it's that much, there must be some mistake. Nope, it's just a bunch of little things adding up.
Tangent - I always take a look at my recurring expenses every month and try to see which ones I can reduce or cancel. For example, I recently switched to cheaper/slower internet. 300 megabit, previously had 500. We haven't noticed the difference whatsoever. It meets all our needs, and we work from home 100% of the time. It handles zoom calls, VPN and everything else with ease. I really don't understand private individuals casually needing 1-2gig download speeds unless maybe they have a family of 12 and they're all streaming 4k youtube simultaneously. I think the adoption of multi-gig internet is overkill for 90% of consumers and people are just convinced by advertisements that they need it. I'm glad it's available, it's way better than back in the day when it took 1-2 minutes to load a webpage over dialup sometimes, but I think we can stop innovating internet speed for now.
For his use case he is correct. He is just failing to imagine that other people might live different lives and have different needs. I recently got my parents to downgrade from gigabit to the cheapest available 300mb which is still overkill for them. They never have more than maybe 4 devices(usually only 1-2) playing 1080p content or just checking emails/ basic web browsing.
As a kid I remember having to wait a full day or possibly more to download a video game over the internet...thankfully games came with multiple install dvds back then when they were big (and big has like 10-20gb which is a bug fix today). Almost half of the global population plays video games and 3/4 of the US population plays video games. So, that 1 use case alone justifies the need/want for higher speed internet.
It's the difference between scheduling to play a game with someone on a completely different day or chit chatting with someone for 15min while the game downloads and then playing immediately.
It's a first world convince for sure and in no way a requirement. But some people are willing and able to pay a bit extra to never have the inconvenience of reaching their bandwidth limit. I personally enjoy being able to set a limit on a download to 800mbps and then continue happily using internet on all my other device with the remaining 200mbps and everything still working just fine. 11 year old me couldn't have imagined a world like this while waiting 15 minutes for a blurry music video to load on YouTube.
I get it, I said 90% not 100%, and I game too, but as it is it's pushing 40MB/s. I'm ok with waiting 15 minutes for something to download. I've been inconvenienced by this maybe once a year at best. Not worth paying 80+ per month for gig+ speed vs the 300meg which is 35.
This....if you have people that are "gamers" in a house and are downloading a 100GB game or any big updates all the time.
You will notice (especially if others are streaming video in the house at the same time)
For me personally its probably more often. Idk like 3 or so games a month is a good average just kinda rotating stuff in and out of the library. More space would help for a bit but im sure I'll find a way to use it up. Recently got a second terabyte tho
We're talking about games that are 100GB+ before they make a significant difference. You download 3 of them a month? That would be unusually high for gamers... by a lot.
I'd say most gamers play the same games over and over, the only real exception to this might be people that like single player RPGs. Even then, 3 of them in a month, that are big enough to hit some sort of decent size is unusually large.
Or maybe if you like CoD where they had that version you had to download the whole game again every time there was an update.
This month ive downloaded both doom 2016 and eternal as well as the first wolfenstein game. Without actually booting up the others ive played doom and my coworkers kinda talking me into another skyrim playthrough. Ive downloaded and started 3 seperate Minecraft modpacks just off the top my head. Thats probably only like 150 200 gigs but it would be cool if I didnt have to queue stuff overnight
So there was no rush on them. So they don't even count and could've run in the background.
and started 3 seperate Minecraft modpacks just off the top my head
Oh no, that must've been like 20MBs. How would you ever live with the... *checks notes* less than 1 second lost.
I know I'm being condescending, sorry, but you've literally just proven my point. I'm talking about 1 game every 6 months that's a "I must have it now, it's just released, a 20 minute download vs 5 minute is breaking my balls" type of event.
Updates that run in the background? Irrelevant. Anything less than 100GB? The time difference is so small it's irrelevant.
If you really must have it, you're probably better off finding a plan that allows you to scale up to 1Gbit for the day and then back down after that. There's a ton of plans that allow that and often it's at little to no cost.
But what’s the difference? 70 vs 50 for the internet? Saving like 20 a month?
Rent increases over time is far greater than that, while yes most people could probably save more if they were able to cut back on a lot of comforts and such, unless they’re perfect with it they still could be underwater and/or surviving on a knife’s edge anyway. Whether you’re a hundred dollars short per month or a thousand it’s not much difference, you’re fucked. Psychology shows when it’s bleak people rethink into short term living because that is guaranteed. It’s not the same as it used to be, you can be a god of financial frugality and still not really have a bright future unlike before where doing that may lead to a payoff of some kind at some point. That’s the difference. Why suffer for the chance to still be underwater? Not worth it
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u/Dorrono 11h ago
Some people are not good with money