If you have ever shopped at a warehouse club, you probably noticed some decent deals on bulk groceries and products. Sure, the per-unit pricing is low compared to smaller packages, but does your home really need a gallon of peanut butter?

Multi-gigabit internet plans are like that. Compared to slower plans, multi-gig speeds are the better value, often having a lower cost per unit (cost per Mbps), but they provide way more speed than the typical home will ever need.

Still, the high-speed plans are rising in popularity, with numerous fiber internet providers and some cable ISPs offering above-gig speeds. Starlink has also indicated that its satellite internet service could reach speeds of 2 gigabits per second at some point.

Should you consider such speeds when shopping for home internet? Here's what to know.

Multi-gigabit internet plans have maximum data transfer rates (internet speeds) of higher than one gigabit per second. What does that mean, exactly?

Internet speeds are advertised and measured in megabits per second, or Mbps. Average tested household speeds as of October 2024 are around 253Mbps, according to recent Ookla speed test data. (Disclosure: Ookla is owned by the same parent company as CNET, Ziff Davis.) That's fast enough to support streaming, gaming, downloading, working from home and so forth on eight or so devices at once.

A gigabit per second is 1,000Mbps, roughly four times faster than the average tested household speed. Multi-gig plans typically boast maximum speeds of two, five or more times faster than that. A five-gig plan, for example, would provide speeds up to 5,000Mbps to the home.

Another key thing to know about multi-gigabit internet is that most providers use a fiber-optic network capable of delivering symmetrical or near-symmetrical download and upload speeds. Fast upload speeds are less important in the grand scheme of home internet use but are still nice to have and something you won't necessarily get from a cable, DSL or satellite internet connection.

So far, numerous major ISPs have introduced multi-gigabit internet speed tiers, including AT&T, Frontier, Google Fiber, Verizon Fios, Xfinity and Ziply Fiber. Several regional and hyperlocal providers offer multi-gig plans with speeds up to 10Gbps as well.

Currently, Ziply offers the fastest multi-gigabit plan with speeds up to 50Gbps, or 50,000Mbps, starting at $900 monthly. Here's a look at the fastest multi-gig plans currently available from the largest internet service providers.

Fiber networks have, for the most part, always had the capacity to deliver multi-gig speeds, but many providers have avoided offering them, partly because people didn't need them and the plans were expensive. As we add more connected devices in our homes and the ongoing pandemic drove record numbers of people to work and learn from home, ISPs saw the need, or at least a potential demand, for faster speeds.

With the fiber-optic infrastructure already in place, boosting speeds was a matter of simply flipping the switch for most providers. Before Ziply Fiber's multi-gig launch, company CEO Harold Zeitz told CNET that such high-speeds are in part "why we built the network the way that we did," so that when the time came to roll out multi-gig service, it'd be available to thousands of homes at essentially "the push of a button."

Depending on the plan you choose, multi-gig service can run well over $100 a month. You get what you pay for -- the speeds are undeniably impressive -- the speeds are overkill for the average home.

Speeds of around 500Mbps should be sufficient for a family of three or four users and all their connected devices, and smaller households with fewer connectivity demands could get by on even slower and cheaper plans. Again, the national speed test average as of October 2024 was 253Mbps.

Furthermore, there's the fact that many devices -- routers, computers, tablets, smartphones, TVs -- are not equipped to handle those speeds. You'll be getting and paying for speeds up to 2Gbps, 5Gbps or higher to your home, but your devices won't achieve such speeds because they simply aren't built with the throughput to support them.

Consequently, I would argue that upgrading to a multi-gig service is not worth the added cost. Faster home internet speeds are a good thing, but I'd say, for now, multi-gig speeds may be too much of a good thing.