How much internet speed do I need?

Reading the household table

Each row describes a household's busiest moment, everything running at once, plus 30% headroom. The pattern is that download needs stay modest: even the family of four, with two 1080p video calls, a 4K stream, a 1080p stream and a game running together, needs about 51 Mbps. That lands on a 100 Mbps plan only because 51 is just over the 50 Mbps tier.

Upload is where plans fall short. The family and the Creator row, with a 1080p60 live stream, each need about 11 Mbps up, more than the 10 Mbps upload many 100 Mbps plans include. If you are weighing a specific offer, is 100 Mbps fast? and is 300 Mbps enough? check each household against those plans, including upload.

None of the five households needs more than 100 Mbps for what it does at once. A faster plan shortens large downloads; it does not make streams or calls better.

How the calculator works

Your connection only has to handle what happens at the same time. Five people who stream at different hours need less than two people streaming 4K while someone else is on a video call. So the calculator asks for the busiest moment, not the number of people or devices.

For each activity it multiplies the number of simultaneous uses by that activity's rate, adds download and upload separately, then applies headroom:

needed = Σ (simultaneous uses × Mbps per use) × (1 + headroom)

Headroom defaults to 30% and covers protocol overhead, Wi-Fi losses and spikes; 20–40% is sensible. The suggested plan is the next common tier at or above the download figure: 25, 50, 100, 200, 300, 500, 1,000 or 2,000 Mbps. Upload is shown separately because it is often what runs out first. Presets for Solo, Couple, Family of 4 (WFH), Gamer household and Creator give you a starting point to edit.

Worked example: family of four working from home

That household fits on a 100 Mbps plan, but only if the upload is more than 10 Mbps: the unrounded figure is 10.01 Mbps, so a 100/10 plan is just short and a 100/20 plan is comfortable. Gigabit would not improve any of those activities; it would only make large downloads finish sooner. Is gigabit worth it? covers that trade-off.

The Creator preset shows the opposite pattern: a 1080p60 live stream (6 Mbps up), a 720p call, a 1080p stream, browsing and six idle devices need only about 12.6 Mbps down but about 10.7 Mbps up with headroom.

Where the numbers come from

Video rates come from Netflix (3, 5 and 15 Mbps for 720p, 1080p and 4K) and YouTube (20 Mbps for 4K, 2.5 Mbps for 720p, 1.1 Mbps for 480p); for 4K the calculator uses the higher YouTube figure. Video calls use Zoom's published bandwidth, cloud gaming uses NVIDIA GeForce NOW's requirements, and live streaming uses Twitch's recommendation of up to 6,000 kbps for 1080p60. Browsing, game traffic, cameras and idle devices are our own estimates and are labelled as such. The full table is in internet speed by activity. All rates are in megabits per second; to compare them with a download window that shows MB/s, use the bytes to Mbps converter.

Speed isn't everything: ping

For games and calls, delay matters more than bandwidth. When you add them, the calculator shows a latency target: under 80 ms to the data center for GeForce NOW cloud gaming (NVIDIA's requirement), under about 50 ms for fast online games (our estimate), and one-way delay under 150 ms for calls, following ITU-T G.114. A faster plan does not lower ping by itself; latency vs bandwidth explains what does. To test a plan you already have, try what can my speed handle, and if you stream or back up a lot, the upload speed calculator goes deeper on upload.