Do You Need a 20 Gig Google Fiber Plan?

So what does someone need to do to take full advantage of a 20 gig connection? The first step is removing bottlenecks between your device and the internet. Fortunately, Google Fiber has already taken care of the most common bottleneck—the router. If your router can reach data rates only up to 500Mbps, it doesn’t matter if your connection can handle 1 gig or 20 gigs, only 500Mbps actually gets to the devices on your network.

With the router issue thankfully handled by Google Fiber, it’s time to move on to the rest of your home network. This can be done either wirelessly or with Ethernet cables.

Most people connect to the internet wirelessly, and Google Fiber’s Wi-Fi 7 router makes that easy. As previously mentioned, Wi-Fi 7 allows speeds of about 5.8Gbps on a single device, which is about twice the max speed of Wi-Fi 6. However, to achieve these speeds, the device in question also needs to be Wi-Fi 7 compatible, and most devices are not there yet.

At the beginning of 2024, most new smartphones, such as the iPhone 15, the Samsung Galaxy S23, and the Motorola RAZR support Wi-Fi 6E. The major exception is the Google Pixel 8. It’s almost like they knew …

Fortunately for early adopters, the Wi-Fi Alliance is predicting rapid adoption of Wi-Fi 7, with millions of compatible devices expected to be manufactured by the end of the year. This won’t be particularly helpful for the first testers in Kansas City and Raleigh, but by the time these plans roll out to more Google Fiber cities, there should be plenty of options for Wi-Fi 7 devices.

Although Google Fiber provides a Wi-Fi router, you can also connect to it via Ethernet. There are two important differences with using physical cables instead of Wi-Fi. First the cables themselves need to support the speeds you want. Second, you can only plug so many cables into your router.

Google Fiber hasn’t announced many specific technical details of its new router, but from the images it has released, it seems to be a branded variant of the Actiontec WF-815/825, which comes with one 10 Gigabit Ethernet LAN port and three 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet LAN ports. That means that one device on your network could reach speeds up to 10Gbps by plugging into the 10GbE port on the router, which is great if you have a primary computer where you do most of your intensive online tasks. Of course, you’d have to make sure that your cables and end devices can handle the speeds as well.

This also means that if you want to get the most out of the three 2.5 GbE slots, you also need cables and network cards that support speeds of at least 2.5Gbps.

Once you’ve properly connected all your devices to a 20Gbps internet connection, what do you do with it?

One of the most common bandwidth-intensive online activities is streaming videos on apps like Netflix or Hulu, but even if you’re watching in 4K Ultra HD resolution, most streaming services recommend having only 25Mbps of speed per device. That means you could be watching 800 different 4K videos in your house at the same time before you ran out of bandwidth. I’m not sure I could even find 800 videos on Netflix I’d want to watch, so this seems like a pretty unlikely scenario.

In addition to streaming ultra-high definition video, the Wi-Fi Alliance suggests VR and other immersive 3D applications as key applications that benefit from Wi-Fi 7 speeds, though you’d still need quite a few people playing VR games in your living room to need a 20 gig connection.

We can think of a few situations where a 20 gig connection could be useful. Content creators could benefit from a 20 gig connection, as uploading video to sites like YouTube can be very time consuming. Upload times could be dramatically reduced with upload speeds of up to 20Gbps. This would also apply to those working or studying remotely that have to routinely upload large files to school or work.

A 20 gig connection could also be helpful to streamers who livestream on multiple platforms simultaneously. There probably aren’t enough streaming sites to use up 20Gbps, even at the highest frame rate and resolution settings, but it would definitely give you plenty of extra bandwidth to avoid any interruptions or lag, even when there are fluctuations in the connection.