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How long will that download take?
Pick your file size and your connection, and get an honest answer — including the real-world overhead your provider’s ads leave out. Handy before you start a 150 GB game download on check-in day.
Common downloads at this speed
Need it done in under…?
Flip it around: how fast would your connection need to be to grab that same file in time?
Paying for gig speed but downloads still crawl?
The plan is rarely the problem — the router, the WiFi, or the wiring usually is. We find the bottleneck and fix it, anywhere from Carova to Ocracoke.
(252) 686-1451Good to know
Megabits vs. megabytes — the sneaky 8×
Internet plans are sold in megabits per second (Mbps); files are measured in megabytes (MB). There are 8 bits in a byte, so divide your plan speed by 8: a 300 Mbps plan moves at most 37.5 MB per second. It’s not a scam, just two industries that never agreed on a unit — but it’s why the numbers never seem to match.
Why you rarely get the advertised number
Plans are “up to” speeds measured over a wired connection in a lab. In real life you lose some to protocol overhead, some to WiFi (distance and walls eat speed fast), some to an old router that can’t keep up, and some to peak-hours congestion — summer evenings on the Outer Banks especially. That’s why we calculate at ~90% even in the best case; over WiFi in a far bedroom, expect much less.
Download speeds on the Outer Banks
Where you are matters: Ripple Fiber is live in more OBX towns every year (with multi-gig tiers), Spectrum cable covers most of the beach with 300–1,000 Mbps plans, and Starlink fills the gaps in Carova and points remote — typically 100–200 Mbps. See what’s available at your address with our Outer Banks internet tools.