Will I notice a difference with 300 Mbps versus 100 Mbps for basic internet use?

[tbeb]

My comcast plan is 300 Mbps.  Modem to 16 x4 DOCSIS 3.0, and router has 10/100/1000 ports.  My laptop ethernet nic is 10/100.  Laptop speed is 94 Mbps.  I use laptop for email, surfing the internet, and xfinity stream.  If I add a usb 3.0 to ethernet gigabit 10/100/1000 lan network adapter, laptop speed will be faster.  Considering what I use my laptop for, will I notice a difference?    

[jweaver0312]

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@tbeb wrote:

My comcast plan is 300 Mbps.  Modem to 16 x4 DOCSIS 3.0, and router has 10/100/1000 ports.  My laptop ethernet nic is 10/100.  Laptop speed is 94 Mbps.  I use laptop for email, surfing the internet, and xfinity stream.  If I add a usb 3.0 to ethernet gigabit 10/100/1000 lan network adapter, laptop speed will be faster.  Considering what I use my laptop for, will I notice a difference?    

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I typically do not recommend using USB adapters, but yes, if you downgrade to 100 Mbps, you wont notice any difference based on your usage.

[tbeb]

Are you saying when I’m on the internet, pages will take the same time to download, no matter if laptop speed is 100 Mbps or 300 Mbps?

[strega7]

A few years ago, I was on 1Mbps DSL and when I visited friends who share the same hobby, I noticed that even though they both had >40Mbps cable internet, common hobby forum sights that we all visited loaded faster on my machine.  The reason was that I use the "noscript" extension in my browser.  While I started doing this for security, it also cuts down massively on DNS references and connecting to dozens of other sites to download all kinds of advertisements, trackers, and other general nuisances.  Without Noscript, some websites these days send your browser off to 20 or more other sites when you load them.

Eventually I upgraded to 50Mbps cable internet and I could see that pages loaded somewhat faster.  Not enough that I would actually pay for more though – the 50Mbps is useful for having multiple HDTV streams going and for downloading operating systems like Windows and Linux distributions way faster than I could before.  But for just browsing pages – even 1Mbps was fine.  (As long as the pages don't have embedded videos, of course.)

By the way, even with my 50Mbps plan, I quickly noticed that many servers will not send at anywhere near that rate.  The servers themselves are often busy with hundreds of current users or limit each client to a certain bandwidth by policy.

[tbeb]

As I said, my laptop speed with a wired connection is 94 Mbps.  Wifi is 40-50 Mbps.  Sounds like both are good speeds for surfing the internet, so I guess there's no reason to buy a usb adapter for a wired connection or a  wifi connection.