You’ve seen the ads. Bell promising “Pure Fibre” at 1.5 Gbps. Eastlink pushing their “Internet 1 Gig” plan. Every major ISP in Canada — and across North America — is locked in a speed war, each one trying to convince you that anything less than gigabit internet is somehow inadequate.
It isn’t. The vast majority of households will never come close to using a gigabit connection. But ISPs have very good reasons for wanting you to buy one anyway. None of those reasons have much to do with your actual needs.
What You Actually Use
The average Canadian household consumes roughly 650–750 GB of data per month. That sounds like a lot, but data volume and speed are different things. The question isn’t how much data you move in a month — it’s how fast you need to move it at any given moment.
Here’s what common activities actually require in terms of bandwidth:
- Web browsing and email: 1–3 Mbps
- Music streaming (high quality): 1–2 Mbps
- Video streaming in HD: 5–8 Mbps
- Video streaming in 4K: 25 Mbps
- Video conferencing (Zoom, Teams): 3–8 Mbps
- Online gaming (gameplay, not downloads): 3–6 Mbps
- A smart home device pinging a cloud server: under 1 Mbps
Now consider a busy household. Two people streaming 4K simultaneously, a kid gaming online, someone on a Zoom call, and a handful of smart devices doing their thing in the background. That’s roughly 70–80 Mbps of concurrent demand. Generous estimates for a heavy-use household with multiple simultaneous 4K streams, gamers, and remote workers top out around 150–200 Mbps.
HighSpeedInternet.com, one of the largest independent broadband review sites, recommends about 100 Mbps for a one-to-two-person household and 250–500 Mbps for larger households. They explicitly state that gigabit plans are not usually necessary. WhistleOut, another major broadband comparison site, suggests 50 Mbps per person as a reasonable planning figure.
A gigabit connection is 1,000 Mbps. For the typical household, that’s five to ten times more capacity than peak demand.
The Speed You’ll Never Actually See
Here’s the part the marketing never mentions: even if you pay for gigabit internet, you almost certainly aren’t getting gigabit speeds on any of your devices.
Wi-Fi is the bottleneck. The overwhelming majority of devices in your home connect wirelessly, and Wi-Fi speeds are significantly lower than advertised maximums due to walls, interference from other devices, distance from the router, and the capabilities of the device itself. Bell’s own fine print acknowledges this, noting that most devices connected to Wi-Fi will reach speeds between 150 and 350 Mbps. That’s with a current-generation router.
Older devices make it worse. A laptop with a Wi-Fi 5 adapter will top out around 400–500 Mbps under ideal conditions. A phone on the 2.4 GHz band might get 50–100 Mbps. A tablet that’s a few years old might cap at 200 Mbps. The only way to reliably hit gigabit speeds is with a wired Ethernet connection to a device with a gigabit network adapter — and most people don’t use Ethernet for anything except maybe a desktop PC or a gaming console.
So you’re paying for 1,000 Mbps and your devices are pulling 150–400 Mbps over Wi-Fi. The pipe is far bigger than the tap.
Why ISPs Want You on Gigabit
If most people don’t need gigabit and can’t even use it, why is every major provider pushing it so aggressively? There are several reasons, and they’re all about the ISP’s interests, not yours.
Higher revenue per customer. This is the big one. The broadband industry runs on a metric called ARPU — Average Revenue Per User. Upselling a customer from a $60/month plan to a $90–120/month gigabit plan increases that metric by 33–50% with almost no increase in the cost to serve that customer. Once the fibre or cable infrastructure is in the ground, the marginal cost of delivering 1 Gbps versus 100 Mbps over that same line is negligible. The speed tiers are largely artificial — a software setting on the ISP’s equipment that caps how fast your connection runs. The infrastructure cost is the same either way.
Justifying infrastructure investment. Bell, Eastlink, Rogers, and Telus have collectively spent billions laying fibre across Canada. Those capital expenditures need to be recouped, and selling premium speed tiers is how they do it. If everyone bought the cheapest plan, the return on that fibre investment would take far longer. Gigabit plans accelerate payback.
Competitive positioning. ISPs don’t actually compete much on price in Canada. In most areas, you have two or three realistic options. So they compete on speed instead, because speed is easy to market. “Fastest internet in Canada” is a compelling tagline. “Adequate internet for your actual needs at a fair price” is not. Speed wars are a marketing arms race, not a consumer-driven demand.
Reducing churn. Customers on premium plans tend to stay longer. The psychology is simple: once you have “the fastest” plan, downgrading feels like a loss, even if you’d never notice the difference in daily use. Higher-tier plans also often come bundled with extras like unlimited data or premium routers, creating additional friction against switching.
Future-proofing as a selling point. ISPs love the “future-proof” argument — the idea that you should buy gigabit now because you’ll need it eventually. This is speculative at best. Bandwidth requirements have grown over the years, but the applications that drove those increases (streaming video, cloud storage, smart devices) have largely plateaued in their per-device demands. 4K streaming, the most bandwidth-hungry common application, has been around since 2016 and still only needs 25 Mbps. 8K content barely exists and won’t be mainstream for years. If and when you actually need more speed, you can upgrade then.
The Pricing Game
Look at how the tiers are structured. Eastlink currently offers Internet 350 at $85/month and Internet 1 Gig at $90/month for new customers. That’s a $5/month difference for nearly three times the speed. After the promotional period, those prices jump to $113 and $118 respectively — again, only $5 apart.
This pricing isn’t accidental. It’s designed to make the gigabit plan look like an obvious choice. Why would anyone take the slower plan when the faster one is only $5 more? The answer is that the ISP would prefer everyone on the higher tier because it gives them a better ARPU number to report to investors, it locks customers into a higher price bracket, and it normalizes the idea that gigabit is the baseline.
Bell runs the same playbook. Their fibre plans are tiered from 50 Mbps up to 8 Gbps, but the price jumps between the mid-tier and gigabit plans are designed to nudge you upward. The $55/month entry point exists mostly so they can say they have an affordable option. The margins and the marketing are built around the top tiers.
What You Should Actually Buy
For most households, a 100–300 Mbps connection is more than sufficient. This covers simultaneous 4K streaming, video calls, gaming, and a house full of smart devices without issue. Independent experts consistently recommend this range.
If you have a large household (five or more heavy users), or if you regularly transfer very large files for work (video editors, software developers working with massive repositories), 500 Mbps gives you generous headroom.
Gigabit makes sense for a narrow set of users: households that routinely download or upload files exceeding tens of gigabytes, people running home servers, or small businesses operating from a residential connection. That’s a small fraction of the market.
Before upgrading, consider what’s actually limiting your experience. If your internet feels slow, the culprit is more likely your Wi-Fi router, your router placement, the age of your devices, or network congestion at peak hours — not your speed tier. Upgrading from 300 Mbps to 1 Gbps won’t fix any of those problems.
The Bottom Line
ISPs sell speed because speed is profitable and easy to market. The infrastructure to deliver it is already in the ground, the marginal cost of faster tiers is minimal, and consumers have been conditioned to believe bigger numbers mean a better experience. In practice, gigabit internet is a premium product being sold to a mass market that has no practical use for it.
You don’t need to feel guilty about buying a mid-tier plan. You’re not missing out. You’re just not overpaying. Take a look at the other guys, the Purple Cow’s in your area.