There are many factors that can affect your speed - time of day, congestion on the network or whether your broadband is fibre, part-fibre or fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC). It’s important to remember that 100Mbps refers to the potential top speed offered by the connection and there is no minimum speed guarantee. Why am I not getting the broadband speeds I signed up for?įor example, if you signed up for a broadband deal that has been advertised at 100Mbps but when you run a speed test, you’re only getting speeds of 20Mbps. Most suppliers offer great introductory offers for gigabit broadband deals, but just keep in mind that your local area needs to have been set up for fibre broadband connection. If you work remotely and need a consistently good connection, or you’re an avid gamer with a next-gen console or PC, a 500Mbs or even a 1Gbs package may be needed. If you have more than five devices in constant use in your household and you want to do all of the above, as well as sharing large files on a regular basis and conducting live video streaming, then you’ll need a connection speed somewhere between 150 and 200Mbps. When you increase the number of devices to three or four and you’re looking to do some online gaming or stream video in 4K resolution, you’ll need a connection that can reach 50 to 100Mbps. The answer depends on two things: the number of devices that are using the connection and the kinds of tasks you’ll be undertaking on a regular basis.Īs a rough guide, a household using one to two devices to browse the web, use social media and stream a moderate amount of video will need speeds that can reach around 25Mbps. How fast does my broadband speed really need to be? Like the ping, it is measured in milliseconds and the lower your jitter, the more consistent your connection is.

Jitter is related to ping, in that it measures how consistent the speed of your ping is.

The lower your ping, the faster your internet connection is at responding to the actions you ask it to take. Ping, which is measured in milliseconds, indicates how quickly your connection can respond to a request. So, don’t worry if your download and upload speeds are vastly different. Upload speeds tend to be a lot slower than download speeds since most of us do much less uploading than downloading. Your upload speed measures the rate at which you are able to add content to the internet or send messages, pictures and videos to others. On the other hand, a low download speed will leave you with long load times and pixelated or laggy video streams.

So, a high download speed will allow you to load internet pages instantaneously and enjoy online video streaming without buffering. This is the rate at which your device is able to access content from the internet. The most important result is the download speed.

Broadband download speed test