The 500Mbps trap
A few years ago, 20Mbps uncapped felt fast. Now ISPs push 200, 500, even a full gigabit as the default recommendation, and the price difference between a sensible package and an enormous one is often only a couple hundred rand a month. So people upgrade, assuming more speed means a better experience. Then nothing changes. Netflix still buffers on a Saturday night, the video call still freezes, and they call us convinced their router is broken.
Here's the part that surprises most people: a single 4K Netflix stream needs about 25Mbps. A video call needs 3 to 5Mbps. Even a household running four or five devices hard at the same time — streaming, gaming, a work call, someone's phone backing up photos — rarely touches 100Mbps of actual demand at any given moment. Paying for 500Mbps when your house peaks at 80 isn't buying you a faster experience. It's buying headroom you'll basically never use.
That's not an argument for buying the cheapest, slowest line available either. It's an argument for matching the number to what actually happens in your home, instead of guessing upward because bigger sounds safer.
What's actually eating your bandwidth
Streaming is the big one, but it's more nuanced than "Netflix uses a lot." Standard definition sits around 3Mbps. HD is closer to 5-8Mbps. 4K jumps to 25Mbps or more, and if you've got two people watching 4K in different rooms at the same time, that's 50Mbps gone before anything else in the house even starts.
Video calls are lighter than people expect, generally 3-5Mbps each way, but they're sensitive to inconsistency rather than raw speed. A call can have plenty of bandwidth available and still stutter if something else on the network is causing brief spikes in congestion — a big download kicking off, a console patching itself in the background.
Cloud backups and syncing are the quiet ones nobody accounts for. Your phone backing up a few thousand photos to iCloud or Google Photos, a laptop syncing a shared folder, a security camera uploading footage continuously — these run in the background and can chew through capacity for hours without anyone in the house noticing until something else slows down.
Gaming itself uses very little bandwidth, often under 1Mbps while actually playing. What gaming needs is low latency and stability, not raw speed, which is a completely different thing your ISP's Mbps number won't tell you anything about.
Working it out for your house
Start with how many people are actually online at once, not how many people live there. A family of four where two people work from home during the day and everyone streams in the evening has a very different peak load to a couple who are mostly out during the day.
Add up your heaviest simultaneous moment. Two 4K streams, one video call, and normal browsing on a few phones lands you around 65-75Mbps of real demand. A 100Mbps line covers that comfortably with room to spare. If your household regularly has three or four people all doing something bandwidth-heavy at the exact same time, 200Mbps starts making sense. Beyond that, for most homes, you're paying for a number rather than an experience.
Businesses and homes running a lot of cloud-based work — video-heavy calls all day, large file uploads, several people on camera simultaneously — are the real exception where the bigger packages pay for themselves. If that's not your situation, it's worth being honest about it before you commit to the top-tier price.
Speed isn't the only variable
None of this matters if the speed you're paying for never reaches the room you're sitting in. A 200Mbps line means nothing to a laptop in a back bedroom if the Wi-Fi signal has dropped to a crawl by the time it gets there through two walls and a geyser cupboard. We see this constantly — someone upgrades their package chasing a problem that was never about bandwidth in the first place, it was about coverage.
So before you change your package, it's worth checking where the actual bottleneck is. Run a speed test on a device plugged directly into the router, then run the same test on the device that's been giving you trouble. A big gap between those two numbers tells you the problem is inside your house, not with your ISP. A mesh system that actually reaches every room, like the Plume setups we install, often solves what looks like a speed problem without touching your package at all.
If you do want a second opinion on what your household actually needs, or you want us to check whether the issue is your line or your Wi-Fi, get in touch. We'd rather tell you honestly that you don't need the upgrade than sell you one you won't feel the benefit of.