Providers sell speed in round numbers — 300 Mbps, 500 Mbps, a full gigabit — and the tier a household lands on often comes down to whichever number looked safely oversized on a signup page, not what the household actually asks a connection to do. The Federal Communications Commission publishes a more useful answer: a …

The fastest way to overpay for gaming internet in Boulder is to assume you need a gigabit plan. The marketing pushes you there, but competitive online play almost never touches the speed ceiling. A typical multiplayer session uses only a few megabits per second — far less than a single Netflix stream. What decides …