500mbps broadband, what do I do with it?

Currently got 30mbps download with BT and it keeps up with everyday demand of a household with three teenagers. But Go Fibre have just laid cable to my house and they are a great, local, company and I’m keen to support them. I’m getting 500mbps from Friday for a lower monthly cost than I was paying for 30mbps with BT. So, what should I do to make use of the mega capacity?

Unfortunately I don’t have the body for Only Fans so that is not an option.

Make sure the router can deliver 500mbps. The high speed is like a new set of fancy wheels, you think it’s ace for the first few rides then it’s normal.

Interested to read the responses…

Modern high speed Internet must have its uses (wfh digi animation / gaming?), but i do wonder the same thing.  I remember speaking with a techie years back and they were talking about office locations relative to data centres, latency for trading floors… But for domestic?

Just run Speedtest on mine.

All I have really noticed since moving to Toob from Virgin is that the internet has stopped disappearing randomly throughout the day and the customer service is helpful rather than run by demonic cock wombles

Enjoy streaming without any pauses.

Wonder how ever managed with 30mb, 500kbs, 56kbs, 33.6kbs.

I think I’m on 250mbps but it’s no longer a metric im really bothered about. I can stream 4k no problem and for gaming it’s only relevant for downloading the game or updates. For competitive gaming it’s more about ping really.

Reliability and price are more important to me now.

30mbs with 3 teenagers and adults in the house they cant be streaming much. When the kids are at mine they go get a bit of a shock going from 900 to my 70 if they need to download anything or do any updates.

I’m currently uploading about 500GB to Google drive. I guess it would be handy for that (assuming the upload speed is good too).

Yeah upload speed… that’s more like 50Mbps against my 500 download speed

As per WCA: you can run speedtest and think “ooh, that’s a big number!”

As per WCA: you can run speedtest and think “ooh, that’s a big number!”
I didn’t really know it was that impressive, it was just a lot cheaper than Virgin, until used the wifi at my uncles house in Lincoln and thought my phone had broken.

“Download Linux ISOs”

Download a car

Coming off a 4G service (ext antenna), three big pluses of moving to fibre are reliability, speed and latency. Probably in that order. Knowing the internet is going to ‘work’ at any time of day makes a big difference to my (mostly) wfh experience. So many times in the past, had issues with Teams, couldn’t download docs, etc because service was so unreliable.

Speed – mostly notice streaming TV (no buffering) and uploading video (used to take hours, now takes seconds). Latency down from 60ms to 10ms, everything just feels snappier.

So hasn’t changed our usage much (maybe we’ll ‘risk’ watching TV in the evening now and I don’t think we were getting 4k before) but it’s good that it’s as reliable (prob more so!) than other untilities

We also have 900 up/down. Could have got away with 300 No problem. But it was £2 more a month and you never know what you might be doing in two years time.

what do I do with it?

Wave it people’s faces like a massive schlong?

The only thing you’ll notice is that while you’ll get 500mbps to the back of the router, most of those megabits will leak out into the air between the router and your computer unless you confine them to a wire.

Wired: 516mbps
Wireless (literally sat next to the router): 350mbps.

Though I did go from about 50mbps to 500 so shan’t moan too much.

Interesting thread. We are on Virgin 350Mb service and paying way more than we should be. Been considering a move for a little while. Toob looks interesting, 900Gb full fibre for £25 a month is crazy talk.

@WorldClassAccident how was the install/cutover? Presumably your Virgin broadband was running on the old co-ax? Did they have to dig and lay cable to the house from the pavement? We don’t have telegraph poles so I imagine there’ll be some digging required.

Wired: 516mbps
Wireless (literally sat next to the router): 350mbps.

I spent a while on the mesh setup to get the best throughput. Had two different makes of TP-LINK Deco’s and found one set (even tho it was 6E ready) didn’t have as much power/radios as the other. So created a ‘backbone’ of the three most powerful ones – newer mac/phones connected to that gets about 500+ wireless, 600 on my iMac via gigabit, other devices including TV etc only get 300. Never going to be a bottleneck tho.

Learned a lot about where to place units. The free wifi sweetspot app for the phone came in very handy.

Apols if I’ve wandered off the point OP!

No harm if you’re paying less for more bandwidth even if you don’t need it, whenever I’ve looked at local fibre supplier deals they’ve always been a cheap intro period followed by a big increase whilst you’re still locked in to a contract so I’ve never bothered switching from my current 70Mbps. It’s only games (and game patch) downloads I ever feel a need for more bandwidth for anyway (and I only dig out the PS5 once every 2-3 months so it’s not a big deal for me).

’ve looked at local fibre supplier deals they’ve always been a cheap intro period followed by a big increase whilst you’re still locked in to a contract

New smaller providers may be bucking that trend. BeFibre gave us three months for £16 then the next 21 at £32. No increase during contract but you are locked in for two years.

We’ve gone from 80mbps to 250mbps. No difference for me but the kids like it as updates to CoD and so forth are much faster.

@WorldClassAccident how was the install/cutover? Presumably your Virgin broadband was running on the old co-ax? Did they have to dig and lay cable to the house from the pavement? We don’t have telegraph poles so I imagine there’ll be some digging required.

Toob are selective in where they are rolling out I thing. It was fibre by telegraph pole to a little box by my feet under the desk.