How fast internet connection has to be?
The answer is, it depends.
And in order to determine the ideal speed for your connection we have some math to do.
A 4K video stream requires a minimum of 15 Mb/s, better if 25 Mb/s are available.
5 Mb/s is the suggested speed for a 1080p video streaming.
As strange as it might sound, online gaming does not require extremely fast speed, usually between 5 Mb/s and 10 Mb/s are enough for games like COD or Fortnite.
Music listening has an extremely wide range of speed requirement, varying between 1 Mb/s up to, in very rare service, 18 Mb/s, depending on the service. Let’s average this to 5 Mb/s
With this information available now we can do our homework.
Parents are watching a movie on the big tv in 4K resolution, son number 1 is streaming at 1080p on another device, son number 2 is playing COD on his console, daughter number 1 is on a different video stream, daughter number 2 is listening to favorite tunes on Spotify, at the same time everyone is randomly watching videos from TikTok, IG, FB and other social media.
So it is 25 + 5 + 15 + 5 + 5 and let’s add a 10 for those random social media videos, bringing our total to 65 Mb/s.
The scenario I’m presenting is probably one of the worst possible, if you already own a 100 Mb/s contract and your Internet service provider is trying to convince you that you need to upgrade your speed to 200, 300 or even more Mb/s is only trying to squeeze more money out of your pocket.
But my streaming is lagging and it’s only two of us at home who are using Internet, you might be yelling at me, well, if this is the case there are some other variables that need to be taken into account, and I will tell you about these in my next article.
Stay tuned.