
With that said, it’s important to choose a speed slightly faster than what you need to account for network slowdowns. The average Wi-Fi speed you experience around your home will generally be anywhere from 20–50 percent below the advertised download speed due to wireless interference and fade as you move further from the router. However, several factors should also be considered - especially for home offices and gaming where upload capacity for files and reaction times are particularly important.Īlong with upload speeds, latency, and your location, another factor to consider is your Wi-Fi network. If you work or study from home (situations that often require more uploading), consider investing in a faster internet plan overall so you can get better upload speeds.Simply put, internet speeds in the 100–200 Mbps range are ideal for most households since they can handle common activities like streaming and video chat for two to five users at once. But you won’t really notice the slower rate unless you spend a lot of time uploading content-for example, by uploading lots of videos to social media or hosting frequent video meetings for work.

Upload speeds are often a lot slower than download speeds. Most of the stuff we do on the internet involves downloading, so internet providers typically advertise download speeds as your primary speed. Upload speed refers to tasks such as uploading data on video call over Zoom or posting your latest dance video to TikTok. You can find your internet speed with our free internet speed test.ĭownload speed measures the amount of Mbps it takes to download a piece of data, like when you download an attachment in an email or stream a movie on Netflix. The Federal Communications Commission defines high-speed, broadband internet as a connection with 25 Mbps download speeds and 3 Mbps upload speeds. Mbps is the range most internet speeds come in. Gbps, on the other hand, is way fast: most internet providers in America can barely hit 1 Gbps. Kbps is less than 1 Mbps, so it represents the slowest speeds possible: basically what you would have gotten over a dial-up connection in the 1990s. But how many bps are we talking about? Usually it’s broken down into three measurements: The abbreviation of “bps” refers to the number of bits that transfer between a network and a device (such as your computer or phone) in a second.ĭownloading, uploading, and bandwidth usually gets measured in bps.

Internet speed is most commonly calculated in terms of megabits per second, or Mbps.Ī bit is the smallest unit of data in digital communications: your basic 1 or 0 in binary code.
