Can't say specifically for Zoom, but I do know that during the pandemic lockdowns, with me on Google Meet or BlueJeans, and my two kids on Teams for their school, our Xfinity 500Mbps service really struggled, and going to their Gigabit service was needed. ISTR that 500Mbps had 20Mbps up and gigabit had 30Mbps, but I might be off there.

Switched to city fiber as soon as it was available and that's been a blessing.

Sounds like your local exchange couldn't cope with the additional traffic rather than your line.

Yea that upgrade caused something else to happen, because like OP said 20mbps of actual bandwidth will support 3-4 people on Zoom,Netflix(non 4k!),gaming just fine.

You probably got a different modem, with more channels, that opened up more actual bandwidth for you.

That's true, I did upgrade from a 3-4 year old DOCSIS 3.0 Surfboard to a 3.1 Surfboard at the same time. I didn't run any metrics to see what actual bandwidth usage was, I was just waiting for symmetric gig fiber at the time.

A significant amount of issues that people have with cable internet is the bad modem/router combination the ISPs ship.

Outside the US coax based internet is rarer (its fibre or copper) so there isn’t a lot of good modem/routers.

So if you can’t get fibre, get an Eero or similar and at least replace your router.

The actual issue which is often blamed on routers/modems is that DOCSIS can be horrendously overcontended, especially on the upstream. It can really vary depending on the CMTS you are on, which means it can change street by street. When the upstream is contended your TCP ACKs get lost/delayed which absolutely hammers performance.

When people replace modems they often get an upgraded one that can support more/better channels or DOCSIS versions. These new channels usually are much less contended (as only a tiny fraction of people have them at first), so it seems like a huge improvement, then as bandwidth demand grows and more people get new modems which can support the additional channel it begins to degrade.

However, I would say that with DOCSIS3.1 and DOCSIS4.0 you are starting to get to a point where there is so much more capacity available and bandwidth growth has slowed down so much you are starting to see a lot less capacity problems IMO.

I was thinking the same. I've been working from home on a rural DSL connection for the past 6 months. 10mbps down and 2mbps up. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, but Teams calls do seem to handle it surprisingly well.

> if it's truly 20Mbps up.

I agree, though "if" is kinda key. And the number of concurrent users in your household. It can be easy to accidentally saturate your uplink if you have multiple users in your family and you aren't coordinating. Or at least that's been my experience.

You can setup QoS on your router. It avoid all those issues.

you're right, there also are some other network parameters on the side: latency (ping time), packet loss and jitter.

needless to say, they're often overlooked.