Internet speeds. (Long post.)

Before I start, let's all just pretend I don't know anything about the internet or it's speeds or mbps. Let's all just pretend I'm completely ignorant on this topic.

I'm tightening my belt and trying to save as much money as possible. That being said--how much internets does I needs you guys?

I mostly just use the internet for browsing and for watching Youtube videos. I also stream movies from completely legit websites *wink*. Occasionally I might download a game or a patch or something. I also don't really do any online gaming. I am the only person who will be using this internet and I only have my computer and game console.

What would be good for me?

I currently have Standard Internet which is 15Mbps at $66/mo (they gave me a "promotion" of $50/mo for a year.)

I could downgrade to Basic Internet which is 6Mbps (I am not sure what the price would be.)

There is also 2Mbps Internet which would be $15/mo (or so they say.)

I was paying through the nose donating $80/mo to my internet service providers coffers.

I have done some research before I posted here and I think 6Mbps might be enough for my needs, but I'm not sure.

Please remember, we are all pretending I'm an idiot so that I can fully understand what is going on. Thank you so, so much to anyone who reads this and helps a luddite.

If you found this price acceptable and thought the speed was good then call them and say you're going to cancel because the promotion period is over. Chances are they'll back-flip and give you the promo price again (or even better) Worst case, you downgrade to something cheaper, best case, you keep your speed for less.

Things like this are pretty dependent on what you're used to in regards to cost and speed, and what your use cases are. 15Mbps seems really slow to me, so I wouldn't downgrade. I find myself cursing slow game download speeds and HD video buffering with faster internet, so I can't really imagine how bad the problem would be at 6 or 2Mbps.

Then again 50 dollars a month is a lot, so if that 6Mbps connection would be more than half the price and you're willing to live with slightly more inconvenience I can totally understand downgrading to gather up some extra coin.

I should have written that sentence clearer.

I am currently paying $50/mo for 15Mbps (after a year it will switch to $66/mo.) Before this happens I will call my ISP and have a chat. Before this I was paying $80/mo which was insane.

I guess what I want to know is, regarding my internet habits, would 6Mbps be enough? Would it be that much of a difference in video quality/speed? I really only do one thing at a time. I don't have five things downloading in the background or anything.

And since we're talking about it, could you get good quality video on 2Mbps? I honestly have no idea.

Also, thanks for the replies. I know this isn't the most exciting of topics.

If 2/6/15 Mbps are the speeds your ISP is advertising, it's important to remember that the actual speeds delivered may be significantly less than these. It's common for ISPs to advertise the maximum theoretical speed, but deliver something slower to many real customers. Low speeds like these sound like DSL, and the delivered speed on a DSL connection can vary widely between customers of the same ISP.

I'd say 2 Mbps is not adequate for your needs, especially the video streaming. 6 Mbps is borderline workable if your actual speed is close to your advertised speed and if you're willing to make some quality concessions.

You should do a speed test to check how close your current speed is to what it's advertised as being. With a little more work, you could also try throttling your current connection to 6 Mbps and then use that for a while and see how it feels to you.

My whole family used to share a 3Mbps. This was fine when all my parents watched was DVD's and TV, but then both of them got laptops and my dad got a Netflix subscription and suddenly sharing the internet became a problem.

When it was only one person, though, it was usable. I mean, you're not going to be streaming 1080p videos on it. You might have to go with 480p sometimes, actually, but that's still totally watchable. Netflix could stream at a fairly good quality when we had 3Mbps.

Download speeds are, of course, not great. Need to download a 500MB patch for a game you just bought? Go make lunch. Want to download a game that's 30GBs in size? Hope you're OK with waiting a few days and/or giving up pretty much all internet access for a day. Some people may think of this as the end of the world - it's not, if you can't find something to do without the internet then you've got bigger problems - but it certainly is a nuisance.

Will 6Mbps do what you need it to do? Sure. It won't do it spectacularly well, and there will certainly be times where you think about what you're going to do while you devote your entire internet connection to downloading something, but 6Mbps can definitely get the job done. While we're at it, do you know what the upload speeds will be?

It says the upload speeds will be up to 1Mbps. This is for all three speeds that I'm looking at. I don't really upload anything though, so I'm not sure if this applies to me.

On my ISPs site they list 15Mbps as $35/mo and 6Mbps as $29/mo (these are introductory offers, but you all knew that.) So, the 6Mbps is only a $5 discount. Unless I can haggle down the price some more then I'm not sure if it's worth it from what you folks are telling me.

I'm also going to do the speed test and see what it says.

I pay $80 for 1GB connection. I could probably do just fine on a $40 plan with 25MB connection but I'd rather have the faster connection.

I was paying $90 a month until this month and now I'm paying $35. All because I called and said I was going to cancel...There's a huge issue with price gouging if all it takes to drop 2/3rds of a bill with a customer is one measly phone call.

They even bumped me up to 30mbps from 20mbps.