In the home office, your partner is working from home. That usually involves streaming video or general browsing. At the kitchen table, one of your kiddos is logging on for remote learning. To start, add up all the activities you and the other people on your home network do at once.įor example, let’s say you often have one person streaming Spotify and browsing Facebook and one Hue bridge with a few connected smart lights, like these from Hue. To figure out the speeds your household needs, you’ll need a little math and a little guesswork.
Internet speed requirements for a household We’ve added some data of our own based on real-life experiences learning, streaming, and working from home. Internet speeds are measured in Mbps, which really just means how much data can travel along the transmission wires at once. The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) (1) publishes a list of download speeds needed for different online activities, and the research is solid. If you’re just watching YouTube or browsing articles and email, you won’t need much speed at all. You can get away with a little less speed for gaming, though you may have to wait a while for huge updates or new game downloads.
You’ll need the fastest internet speeds for streaming video in ultra-high definition, especially if you’re in a video call with lots people. For bigger households or high-bandwidth activities, you may need more speed.
For example, a device streaming in 4K will require only 25 Mbps, and YouTube needs only 3 Mbps.įor most households of one or two people, the least expensive speed offerings of cable and fiber-optic providers should be plenty fast. Most apps don’t use very much bandwidth on their own, but bandwidth (measured in megabits per second or Mbps) can add up quickly when multiple devices are using the internet. The most important factor in how much internet speed you need at home is how many devices are connecting at once.
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