1Password (I actually get to via work), nextdns and Home Assistant.

For the last 2.5 years, I’ve been living somewhere where I’m getting 30Mbps down, and 6 up…

I’m also a keen self-hoster - I host a Plex server that others stream from, self host game servers, and I download a bunch of things. We’re a family of 4, though my two kids are pretty young, so aren’t yet at the stage of doing a lot of online stuff. I also work from home permanently, so I’m on Teams calls all day.

Whilst I would love more bandwidth (and we’re planning to move soon), its been manageable, accepting that here’s some stuff we simply can’t do, such as streaming games.

Firstly, if you think about the usage, you can probably break it down as follows:

1. Realtime, low bandwidth - things like web browsing, video and voice calls etc.
2. Realtime, high bandwith - streaming Netflix etc.
3. Non realtime, high bandwidth - downloads.

What you need to do is ensure that 1 continues to work well at all times, that 2 is as good as possible, and that 3 uses the least bandwidth as possible at times when 1 and 2 are needed.

One advantage I have is that I basically oversee the majority of tech in the house. This has allowed me to do various things to try to manage things. I have a decent home network (based on UniFi) and I self host a bunch of things, and that’s given me some flexibility.

So with that said, here are some tips:

• Aggressively manage buffer bloat - this means that even if a good amount of the bandwidth is in use, it doesn’t impact low bandwith, real time usage, like Teams. If your router doedn’t support smart queueing features, get one that does.
• If there’s overlap in the games being played, look at ways to cache those huge downloads. Steam now has a feature that allows 1 PC to serve downloads to others, but you need to turn it on for it to work with other accounts - do that.
• If you’re able to self-host, look at LanCache, as that will let you cache game installs from any installers.

Beyond that, find out what bandwidth hogging things your family needs to do. If your kids are downloading movies that’s going to kill it for everyone, so look for ways to centralise that sort of thing. If that’s not really possible, then setting bandwidth limits based on user or device may be possible, though probably only if you can schedule it. So the TVs and streaming devices could get full bandwidth, but PCs could get reduced bandwidth during the evening (to stop large doenloads killing video watching) and get more overnight.

Ultimately you’re not going to be able to support 6 people all streaming Netflix at 4k at once. Personally I think that’s an unlikely worst case, and with some care and thought, and depending on your network setup and knowlexge, you can manage the resources you have.

Good luck!

This is a bit of a generalisation. I’m currently staying somewhere with awful Internet (6mpbs upstream) and I’ve still been able to host dedicated servers for Valheim, Conan, Minecraft and even Astroneer, which is pretty basic in server options. Now these aren’t huge player counts - maybe 6 or less, but that’s probably pretty typical for a small gaming group.

Of course more bandwidth is great, and no doubt some games are much more bandwidth intensive on the server side, but I wouldn’t discount the option to self host just because you’re not rocking a lot of bandwidth.

I will add that I have configured my network to aggressively manage buffer bloat, so latency is very good - that no doubt helps a lot, but is of course something that a lot of people can do, depending on the features in their router.