Remember during the height of the pandemic restrictions, when your entire life basically depended on how fast your internet was? So many people remember, but so few people agree on how many Mbps you really need to stay productive online.
Network cables are plugged in a server room on November 10, 2014 in New York City.
The speed of your internet connection is perhaps the one thing that led you to buy in with your current ISP. But how fast is truly fast? In this article, you'll learn about a few more tidbits on this matter.
The Basics
Tom's Guide mentions several important quick tips about how fast your online connection should be, depending on certain situations.
- Streaming media (i.e. Netflix): Most of the time, media streaming services say that you need at least 5 Mbps to watch content in Full HD (1080p) resolution, and at least a 25 Mbps if you want to watch 4K. But the thing is, this only matters on ONE device. If you want everybody else in your home to watch at the same resolution you do, on their own devices, you'll need a bit more speed than just 5-25 Mbps (megabits per second).
- Maybe go for gigabit plans: Gigabit connection plans come in at least 1,000 Mbps speeds (that's why it's called gigabit). If so many people in your household at once require excellent connections, go for this one. Again, it's all about how "data hungry" the entire household is.
- More devices, more bandwidth required: Similar to streaming HD media to multiple devices at once, it's also important to get as much download speed as you can from your ISP. A good baseline download speed is 200 Mbps, according to RouterCtrl, which should be enough for a very data-hungry home.
- Old hardware can be tanking your speed: How old is your router? If your ISP says that your plan should be fast enough but it still isn't, then your aging hardware is to blame, not them, writes HighSpeedInternet. For example: if you pay for gigabit internet but your router can only pump out 300 Mbps, there's the problem right there.
The new Vodafone LTE high-speed router (L) and modem stand on display at the Vodafone stand at the CeBIT technology trade fair on February 28, 2011 in Hanover, Germany.
Read Also: Japanese Researchers Break Internet Speed Record Using Optical Fiber-How Did They Do It?
How Much Data Do You Use Daily?
CNET provides a breakdown of how much data you consume just by doing normal stuff on the web, like emailing, browsing, social media, and video calls.
The activities that consume the less data are the simplest: sending emails (1 Mbps), and browsing the web/social media sites, as well as doing video calls (3-5 Mbps). Playing online games also doesn't actually consume much data (3-6 Mbps). But your data consumption climbs as soon as you start streaming HD TV shows and movies (5-10 Mbps), which can go to as high as 25 Mbps if you watch in 4K.
Netflix
To ensure that you can do these things without a hitch, here's how fast of a plan you'll need to pay for:
- Emails: 1 Mbps minimum
- Web browsing: 5-10 Mbps
- Social media: 10 Mbps minimum
- Video calls and HD content streaming: 10-20 Mbps
- Online games: 25-35 Mbps, more so if you livestream
- 4K content streaming: 35 Mbps minimum
Upload Speed Vs. Download Speed
Here's another thing that can get confusing: upload vs download speeds. A general rule of thumb is that download speed is more important than upload speed if you're an average internet user, writes Minim. By "average," we mean that you do the things that were enumerated in the previous paragraph (emails, social media, watching Netflix, etc).
But if you're more of a power user (i.e. a content creator, or your job requires that you send big files/make constant video calls, or if you livestream your gaming sessions), then upload speed matters, according to AllConnect.
Related Article: How Can I Tell If My ISP Is Throttling My Internet?
This article is owned by Tech Times
Written by RJ Pierce
* This is a contributed article and this content does not necessarily represent the views of techtimes.com
