Everyday Internet & Troubleshooting
What Is a Good Internet Speed?
"Fast enough" depends on what you do online and how many people share the connection. Here's a practical guide to the numbers.
What the numbers mean
Speed is measured in megabits per second (Mbps). Download speed affects streaming and browsing; upload speed affects video calls, cloud backups, and posting. Latency (ping, in milliseconds) is the delay — it matters more than raw speed for gaming and calls.
Rough guidelines per activity
- Browsing & email: 5–10 Mbps is plenty.
- HD video streaming: ~5 Mbps per stream; 4K: ~25 Mbps per stream.
- Video calls: 3–5 Mbps up and down, with low latency.
- Online gaming: speed matters less than a stable ping under ~50 ms.
- Working from home: 50–100 Mbps handles calls, cloud, and streaming at once.
Don't forget it's shared
A 100 Mbps plan is split across every device in the house. A busy household streaming, gaming, and backing up at once needs more headroom than one person browsing.
Test your real speed
Advertised speeds are best-case. Measure what you actually get with our browser-based speed & latency test — it reports your download speed, best-case latency, and the nearest major network. For the theory, see bandwidth vs. latency.