Internet plans are marketed the way processors used to be: one big number, as if more is always better. In practice most households need far less than they are sold, and the households that genuinely do need a lot need it for reasons the marketing never mentions. Here are the real figures.
What each activity actually uses
These are the published requirements from the services themselves, per simultaneous stream or session:
- 4K / Ultra HD video — Netflix recommends about 15 Mbps, YouTube around 20 Mbps, Disney+ about 25 Mbps.
- 1080p video — roughly 5 Mbps.
- 720p video — roughly 3 Mbps.
- Video calls (Zoom, Meet, Teams) — about 2.5-4 Mbps in each direction for HD one-to-one; group calls sit at the higher end.
- Online gaming — surprisingly little bandwidth, often under 5 Mbps. What gaming needs is low, steady latency, which is a different measurement entirely.
- Web browsing, email, social media — negligible, a few Mbps at most.
- Large file uploads, cloud backup, sending video to clients — this is the one that catches people out, and it is governed by your upload speed, not download.
Add them up, do not take the maximum
The mistake is sizing a plan for the single heaviest activity. Bandwidth is shared, so what matters is the worst realistic simultaneous load. A household with one 4K TV, one person on a work video call and a teenager gaming is not a 15 Mbps household — it is roughly 15 + 4 + 5, plus background traffic, so somewhere around 30 Mbps of genuine demand.
Then add headroom. Connections rarely deliver their rated speed over wifi at a distance, and streaming services degrade quality when throughput dips rather than when it is merely low. A useful rule: size for double your calculated peak demand. The household above is comfortable on 50-60 Mbps and gains very little from 300.
Where the extra money is actually worth spending
If your realistic demand is met, a bigger download number changes almost nothing you can perceive. Three things do:
- Upload speed, if you work from home. Video calls, large file transfers, cloud backup and any kind of content upload all live here, and cheap plans are often heavily asymmetric — 100 Mbps down but only 10 or 20 up. If your calls freeze while your downloads are fine, upload is why.
- Latency and consistency, if you game or spend your day on calls. A steady 50 Mbps connection beats an erratic 300 Mbps one for both.
- Fibre over cable, where available, largely because it is less affected by peak-hour contention and usually offers far better upload.
Check what you have before you upgrade
Before paying more, find out what you are actually getting. Run a speed test a few times, including once during evening peak, and note all four numbers — download, upload, ping and jitter.
Very often the result is that the plan is already big enough and the wifi is the constraint, in which case a better router or a mesh node costs less than a permanent plan upgrade and fixes more. If your download is close to your plan speed but calls still stutter, look at the upload figure and the jitter figure rather than the headline number.
A quick sizing table
- 1-2 people, browsing and HD streaming — 25-50 Mbps is plenty.
- Family, one 4K stream, some calls — 50-100 Mbps.
- Multiple 4K streams plus remote work — 100-200 Mbps, and check the upload figure specifically.
- Heavy content upload, several remote workers, home server — 200+ Mbps, ideally symmetric fibre.
Beyond that, you are buying a number rather than an experience. The honest test is to measure what you have, work out what you use, and only then decide whether the gap is real.
