What is a good internet speed for netflix and gaming?

[Rioichi]

I am researching different internet options, unfortunately most do not service my area. There is ONE provider besides satellite, and they are not very reliable, HOWEVER, they offer up to 24mbps speeds. Well. They told me I could only get 12mbps, we set up an installation date, and when I called to confirm the date, they said "oh, well, we cancelled that date because the engineers are seeing what speeds you can get in that area and we dont know how long that will take." Would have been nice of them to tell me that. SO I've been researching other options and the only other ones I MIGHT be able to get are satellite. For what I would pay for the 12mbps through the other company, I could get: 5mbps download speed, 1mbps upload speed, 5 GB anytime data, 5 GB bonus data. Would that be enough to run netflix (nigh on constantly) and play online games on a PS3 and computer?

[409]

You should avoid getting any internet service that has data caps. I'm a "power user" and usually average over 100GB a month. You have to remember that that data caps includes both downloads and uploads.

If you are not sure... then just follow the general rule of thumb: Buy what you can afford

[john]

Of course you can play online games and watch youtube videos with no lag
You can actually do that with 1 meg like me but 1 meg = 800 kbs sadly with att

[Matthew]

10 GB of data won't last long if you are spending any serious amount of time streaming video (even just 480p).

Two concerns with gaming. First is it would depend on how bandwidth intensive the specific games you are playing would be. You could easily get by with 10GB for some games but others you might be running into a problem.

The second gaming concern is a big one if you are playing "twitch" games, such as racing, FPS (shooters), or any game that requires quick reactions. With any connection, you have ping. Ping is the time it takes to send a signal to another computer through the Internet, and then receive one back. Internet that runs through the actual satellite dish would experience long ping times. You could have a delay of up to a second from the time you push a button until it travels to the game server and then you receive the response back from the server. High ping (long time for signal to travel between you and a server) is one of the most common things that leads to the infamously annoying "lag" people get in games.

Ping won't bother you with streaming video, but that 10GB data limit will definitely be a problem and really limit how much you can watch. Video streaming and online gaming each have their own separate problem when using satellite Internet.

As far as speed, 5 down and 1 up would be fine for both. You might need to let you video buffer for a few minutes but it should be fine after that as long as your connection is steady. 5 down for gaming is definitely more than enough. Gaming isn't so much about getting a lot of data through in a short time, but rather sending smaller amounts of data with low ping.

I would definitely suggest going the cable/dsl route based on your needs as satellite would be severely limiting to both streaming and gaming.