What is a good internet speed?

A good internet speed is one that does what you need without waiting. For a single person who streams and browses, that can be 25 Mbps. For a family of five with two gamers and someone on video calls all day, it might be 500 Mbps. The headline download number is also only one of four measurements that decide how your connection feels.

This guide gives concrete numbers per activity and per household, so you can compare them with a speed test of your own line.

The four numbers that matter

Megabits vs megabytes

Internet speeds are sold in megabits per second (Mbps). File sizes and download progress bars usually use megabytes (MB). One byte is eight bits, so divide by eight:

• 100 Mbps ≈ 12.5 MB/s
• 500 Mbps ≈ 62.5 MB/s
• 1 Gbps (1000 Mbps) ≈ 125 MB/s

If your game launcher shows 11 MB/s on a 100 Mbps plan, you are getting roughly what you pay for.

How much speed each activity needs

These are per-device figures for a smooth experience, based on what the major services recommend, with some headroom added. Streaming services adapt quality to your connection, so below these numbers you get lower resolution rather than an error.

Two things stand out. First, a single 4K stream needs less than most people expect. Second, upload and ping are what video calls and games care about, and they are exactly the numbers that cheap plans and congested Wi-Fi hurt most.

Where raw speed does matter: big downloads

Download speed changes waiting time in direct proportion. A 50 GB game takes:

These are best-case figures; the game store’s servers and your disk can be the bottleneck on fast lines. If you regularly move large files, upload is worth checking too: on a 10 Mbps upload, a 5 GB video takes over an hour to reach the cloud.

How much speed a household needs

Add up what people do at the same time, not over the day, and leave about 30% headroom for background updates, phones syncing photos and smart devices.

For reference, the US regulator FCC defines broadband as at least 100 Mbps download and 20 Mbps upload (raised from 25/3 in 2024). That is a sensible minimum for a multi-person home today.

What a good ping looks like

Latency is about distance and the number of hops, not bandwidth. A gigabit line with 80 ms ping will feel worse in a game than a 50 Mbps line with 15 ms. Rough guide:

Jitter matters as much: a steady 40 ms is better than a ping that jumps between 15 and 120 ms. For calls, aim for jitter under 30 ms; for games, under 10 ms. Packet loss should be 0%; even 1–2% causes stutter in calls and games. The ping test measures latency and jitter from your browser.

Why your result is lower than your plan

Speed tests measure the whole path from your device to the test server. Common reasons a result comes in under the advertised figure:

• Wi-Fi. The most common cause by far. Walls, distance, older devices and neighbours’ networks on the same channel can cut throughput by half or more. Test once on a cable plugged straight into the router to separate Wi-Fi problems from line problems.
• Old hardware. A router or laptop with 100 Mbps Ethernet ports caps you at about 94 Mbps no matter what you pay for. Wi-Fi 4 (802.11n) devices rarely exceed 100–150 Mbps in practice.
• Other traffic. Someone streaming, a console updating or cloud backup running in the background all share the line.
• Distance to the test server. A server on another continent adds latency and lowers measured throughput. Our speed test shows where its server is, so you can factor that in.
• VPN. Encryption overhead and the extra hop to the VPN server reduce both speed and ping.
• Peak hours. Evenings are when neighbourhood networks are busiest, especially on cable.

How to test properly

1. Use a wired connection if you can, or stand near the router.
2. Pause downloads, updates and streams on other devices.
3. Turn off the VPN unless you want to measure the VPN itself.
4. Run the test two or three times, and at different times of day if you suspect congestion.
5. Compare the median result with your plan. Consistently below 80% of the advertised speed over a cable is worth raising with your provider; take screenshots with dates and times.

Do you need gigabit?

Most homes don’t, today. Gigabit pays off if several people download large files often, if you upload a lot of video, or if it costs little more than a slower plan (common with fibre). If your complaint is lag in games or choppy calls, a faster plan rarely fixes it. Look at ping, jitter and Wi-Fi first.

In short

• 25–50 Mbps covers one or two light users; 100–200 Mbps covers most families; 300 Mbps+ is for heavy, simultaneous use.
• Upload matters for calls, streaming and backups. Aim for at least 10–20 Mbps.
• Ping under 50 ms and jitter under 10–30 ms matter more than raw speed for games and calls.
• Test over a cable before blaming your provider.