I would think hard about upgrading to a "faster" plan.
The Wall St. Journal did  a study that basically said you gain no advantage for streaming media by upgrading to a faster plan.
The WSJ article is behind a pay wall, but this article summarizes the results.
https://medium.com/gowander/quick-take-wsj-the-truth-about-faster-internet-its-not-worth-it-c73d79a616b9

I've been working from home since last March when Covid started. I have two kids. One is in high school who is on Zoom all day for school. The other is streaming Pluralsight/Youtube/Coursera all day doing self-learning to become a software dev. I'm a DBA and am on all kinds of video calls/meetings throughout the day as well as transferring large files to/from my local network. My wife works remotely as well (altho not very many video meetings).  In the evening the kids are streaming movies/Youtube/video games/Discord/etc. With all this streaming going on I've never experienced any noticeable lag/dropouts in streaming or video conference calls. However, we consistently *almost* reach our 1.25TB cap each month. I have the Cox "Internet Preferred" plan (100Mb down/10 up). Since we are using a lot more data I'm considering upgrading our data cap (but not the speed).

As far as the redundant ISP idea, I too worry about this. But my plan in the event of an ISP outage is to use my mobile phone as a hot spot. It'll work in a pinch to get me by until the outage is resolved. I've only ever experienced short outages with Cox, so having a backup ISP seems like a lot of wasted money in my opinion. But, you have to assess you're own situation and make the decisions that work for you.

Something to consider....
Peter
On 1/26/2021 3:49 PM, der.hans via PLUG-discuss wrote:
Am 26. Jan, 2021 schwätzte Mike Schwartz so:

moin moin Mike,

OT: Off topic ... Hi from an old timer ... plus, a Question

Please forgive me if I have been "out of radio contact" for too long.

Yeah, it's been a while :).

I believe both CenturyLink and Cox are offering Gigabit if you're in the
right part of town. At least Cox puts a data maximum on it. I believe
someone pointed out that a true gigabit connection can hit the monthly
maximum in a few hours.

I was switching ISPs about the time that the pandemic started, so just
kept the old connection. I'm on one connection for dayjob and the family
uses the other.

Since the pandemic has started both ISPs have had multi-hour outages, so
it's been handy to have a spare. Paying for two connections is a lot
cheaper than not getting paid due to overloaded bandwidth :).

ciao,

der.hans

(as in ... the "Wolf Brand chili" slogan)
  (see, e.g.,
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22Wolf+Brand+chili%22+slogan&t=h_&ia=web
OR ... just click over to the "[[Slogan]]" *section* of the Wikipedia
article about "Wolf Brand chili" ... at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Brand_Chili#Slogan


* * * Question: * * *
We upgraded our ISP service (at home) when my wife started working from
home ... around the beginning of the pandemic. It is still "DSL", --
through "CenturyLink" -- but supposedly it is now FOUR times faster than it
used to be, (it "had been" ... for * * * *years. ** * *)

I think we need something faster now. (We have 3 adults ... and make use of
[either Zoom or "Google Meet" or something similar] a lot lately.

Any advice?
(including, whether or not we should have more than one ISP, just to be on
the safe side?)

Thanks in advance, ...

Mike Schwartz
   [elderly] timer
   I may be in the Plug-Discuss archives ... if they [still] go "WABAC"
...
Glendale  AZ
schwartz@acm.org 



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