How Much Internet Speed Do I Need?
Speed requirements are set by what happens at the same time, not by how many devices are in the house. Here is the arithmetic, including the upload number almost everyone gets wrong.
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Details verified August 28, 2026
Count concurrent activities, not devices
A house with thirty connected devices and two people in it needs less bandwidth than a house with eight devices and five people. Phones on standby, smart bulbs, thermostats and speakers consume almost nothing. What consumes bandwidth is a stream playing, a call connected, a file transferring. Count those, at the busiest moment of a typical evening, and you have your number.
- 4K video stream: roughly 25 Mbps down
- 1080p video stream: roughly 5 Mbps down
- 1080p video call: roughly 4 Mbps down and 4 Mbps up
- Cloud backup running: 10-50 Mbps up, whatever is available
- Security camera uploading: 2-3 Mbps up per camera
- Large game download: saturates whatever is spare
- Web browsing, email, music: under 2 Mbps combined
Add 40% headroom, then round to a tier
Add up the concurrent figure and add roughly 40%. That margin absorbs the difference between advertised and delivered throughput, Wi-Fi overhead across a house, and the evening when someone unexpectedly downloads a console update. A household whose honest peak is 90 Mbps should be on a 300 Mbps tier, not a 100 Mbps one — but it does not need a gigabit, and the gap between 300 Mbps and 1 Gbps will be invisible to it.
Now do the upload calculation, which is the one that matters
Download is over-bought and upload is under-bought, almost universally. A 100 Mbps non-fiber line has roughly 20 Mbps of upload. One 1080p video call takes 4 Mbps of that. Three security cameras take another 9 Mbps. A cloud backup will take everything left and then start degrading the call. If anyone in the house works from home or you plan to run cameras, look at the upload column first and let it choose the tier.
- One person working from home, no cameras: 10 Mbps up is workable
- Two people on calls simultaneously: 20 Mbps up minimum
- Four security cameras recording to cloud: 12 Mbps up before anything else
- Regular large file uploads or video editing: symmetrical fiber, not a cable tier
Where Wi-Fi, not the line, is your real limit
Above roughly 300 Mbps, the constraint in most homes stops being the service and becomes the Wi-Fi between the gateway and the device. Expect 700-900 Mbps over Wi-Fi on a gigabit line within a room of the gateway, and considerably less across a floor or through masonry. If speed tests are disappointing on a fast tier, the answer is usually gateway placement or a mesh node, not a higher tier.
The honest summary
Most households of two to four people are correctly served by 300-500 Mbps. Households running multiple 4K streams alongside home working want 500 Mbps and symmetrical upload. Gigabit and above is worth buying for genuine multi-user upload demand or a wired multi-gig setup, and is largely wasted otherwise. The tier that is actually wrong for most people is the 100 Mbps entry tier, and the reason is upload, not download.
Where This Leads
The specification pages below carry the full figures behind everything above — speeds, upload, latency, device lists, sensor counts and contract mechanics.
Availability and terms depend on the address, so both are confirmed on the call. The arithmetic above gets you to the right tier or the right device count; the call confirms what actually provisions where you live.
Common Questions
Does more speed make my Wi-Fi reach further?
No. Range is a function of the gateway's radios, its placement, and what your walls are made of. A faster tier delivers more throughput where the signal is already good and changes nothing where it is not.
Do I need gigabit for gaming?
No. Online gaming uses very little bandwidth — latency is what matters, and latency is set by the connection type, not the tier. Fiber at 300 Mbps gives a better gaming experience than cable at 1 Gbps. Downloads are the only place the higher tier helps.
How many devices can one connection handle?
Modern gateways handle 50 or more associated devices without difficulty. The limit is concurrent bandwidth, not device count. Twenty idle smart-home devices are irrelevant; three simultaneous 4K streams are not.
Is the advertised speed what I actually get?
Wired, on fiber, yes — close to it. Over Wi-Fi, no, and that gap widens the faster the tier. On a shared cable segment, evening throughput can also fall below the advertised figure at peak hours, which fiber does not do.
Talk It Through for Your Own Home
The general arithmetic gets you close. The specifics — your floor plan, your address, what has actually been built on your street — are a five-minute conversation.
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