How much internet speed do you actually need?

The number is bandwidth, not speed

Internet "speed" in Mbps is really bandwidth — how much data can flow at once, like the number of lanes on a highway. More lanes let more activities happen simultaneously without slowdown; they don't make any single car go faster. That's why jumping from 400 Mbps to 2 Gig rarely feels different for one person watching Netflix, but matters a lot for a busy household of six all online at once.

Here's roughly what common activities consume, so you can add up your own household:

So what tier fits your home?

A realistic 400 Mbps household

Two people working from home on video calls, a 4K TV going, a teenager gaming, phones and a smart-home in the background, a cloud backup running — add it up and you're around 60–70 Mbps at peak. A 400 Mbps symmetrical plan absorbs that with enormous headroom to spare. For the large majority of Bastrop County homes, 400 Mbps is the right answer, and it's Highline's entry tier (see plans and pricing).

When 1 Gig or 2 Gig earns its keep

Go higher if you have a lot of heavy simultaneous users, you routinely upload big files (video creators, photographers, remote engineers), you run home servers or NAS backups off-site, or you just want to never think about it again. The jump from 1 Gig to 2 Gig is mostly future-proofing and bragging rights for a typical family — worthwhile if the price gap is small, unnecessary if it's large.

Gaming: it's latency, not speed

The single most misunderstood thing in internet marketing: for gaming, bandwidth barely matters — latency does. Latency (ping, measured in milliseconds) is how long a signal takes to reach the server and come back. A 50 Mbps connection with 15 ms latency will out-game a 2 Gig connection with 80 ms latency every time. This is exactly where fiber wins: fiber typically delivers single-digit-to-low-teens latency, cable is a bit higher, 5G home internet varies, and satellite is higher still because the signal travels to orbit and back. A gamer should care about the technology (fiber) more than the tier (400M vs 1G). We compare the technologies on latency on the alternatives page.

Why upload speed quietly matters

Cable gives you a big download number and a small upload number. But modern life uploads constantly — video calls send your camera feed up, security cameras stream up, cloud backup and photo sync push up, and every online game sends your inputs up. Fiber's symmetrical upload (400 up on the entry tier) is why a fiber connection often feels faster than a cable plan with a bigger download headline.