Using 4G for home internet - bad idea?

[JerseyFoo]

I'm relocating to Raleigh, NC. Apparently cities now have WiMAX -- 1 megabyte down, 1 megabit up for around $40-50... anywhere.

Seems too good to be true imo, what's going on here? Still can't figure out the difference between home internet and on-the-go.

 

[Slapshot136]

usually there would be some sort of cap as to how much you can download in a month (usually 5gb for on-the-go) or something similar, vs like 100-250 gb for a "normal" home internet - also 1 mb down isn't fast enough for youtube 720p(it might not even be enough for 480p), so you can't really do much streaming/etc.

then there is also ping - normally ping would be ~30 or so for a home connection, but more around 80-100 for a mobile connection, this matters more for gaming then anything else, try checking your ping - open or run "cmd", then type "ping google.com" or some major site and see what you get

 

[JerseyFoo]

1 megabyte down is far more than enough for youtube HD streaming. It says it's unlimited for 4g, 5GB for 3g.

 

[Slapshot136]

youtube 360p takes about .6 mb/sec
youtube 480p takes about double that, 1.2 mb/sec - your confusing the advertised speed (megabit) with what you use 99% of the time (megabyte) - the difference is a factor of 8

 

[JerseyFoo]

No u.

I'm going based on experience that youtube HD doesn't require over a megabyte per second. Considering I just watched a 'HD' youtube video with crappy hotel wifi...

I'll test it later.

 

[Slapshot136]

No u.

I'm going based on experience that youtube HD doesn't require over a megabyte per second. Considering I just watched a 'HD' youtube video with crappy hotel wifi...

I'll test it later.

try downloading the youtube video, then seeing what size the resulting file is, then divide it by the time - thats what I did to get those numbers

 

[sqrage]

My internet downloads at roughly 1.2 MB/s when loading a 720p youtube video. It loaded an 8 minute video of a single image as the video frame and the rest as high quality audio in about 5 seconds. So much less should be more or less sufficient.

 

[Risen]

This probably needs clarification.

MB/s = MegaBITS per second.
Mb/s = MegaBITES per second.

We're more adjusted to the Mb side.

A 2:21 Youtube Trailer of TRON is..

360p; = 8.09 Mb
480p; = 15.84 Mb
720p; = 35.26 Mb
1080p; = 59.74 Mb

So, based on these file sizes, to watch 1080p, you'll need about 423 Kb/s internet, or 3.3 MB/s ISP-labelled internet.

Of course, you probably won't get more than 500kb/s from YouTube as they limit the amount of bandwidth you can use with them.

 

[Slapshot136]

or for 480p, you would need (15.84 mb/141 sec) = 112 kB/sec, or about .9 mb/sec - which would be at/near the limit of a 1 mb/sec plan - anything above that will require faster internet, or that + doing anything else, etc.

 

[codemonkey]

1MBps is more than enough to handle 720p youtube. He says he would be getting one megabyte down.

 

[Slapshot136]

1MBps is more than enough to handle 720p youtube. He says he would be getting one megabyte down.

since when does any internet/wireless/etc. advertise in megabytes?

 

[Samuraid]

since when does any internet/wireless/etc. advertise in megabytes?

Perhaps they did advertize in megabits, but maybe JerseyFoo converted to megabytes for the sake of convenience.

Either way, 1 megabyte per second is far more bandwidth than youtube consumes for a single HD video. 1 megabyte per second is even enough to stream most main profile DVD MPEG2 video streams.

As for the question at hand, it's worth taking latency into consideration. Not sure about how 4G's latency compares with standard copper/fiber internet. If you are just streaming video or loading web content, it probably won't matter. But if you are planning on network gaming using the 4G connection, it might be worth doing some research to see how responsive 4G networks are.