What Is A Good Internet Speed?

If you’re looking to upgrade your Internet speed, you might be wondering what a good Internet speed is to upgrade to. In 2018, we are connected more than ever, and using all sorts of devices that require a solid Internet connection. We have smart home devices that are now requiring Internet connections, and that’s on top of our smartphones, tablets, computers, laptops, and TVs. All of that can take up a lot of traffic on your home Internet, and might even bring your speeds to a crawl. So, what is a good Internet to handle all of this demand? If you follow along below, we’ll show you what options you have.

Try a Router upgrade

Before you upgrade your Internet speed, you might actually want to consider looking at your router for starters. You could simply be having a problem with an old router that isn’t able to keep up with all of the connected devices. If you haven’t upgraded it in a couple of years, you might be on old technology that can only support, say, 10 or 15 devices well on your network. By upgrading to a modern router, you should be able to get something that handles up to fifty devices without any problems. On top of that, many new routers are supporting the 5GHz frequency, which brings you faster speeds with a better WiFI signal.

If upgrading your router didn’t work, you might actually need to upgrade your Internet package. But what is a good speed for gaming, streaming, surfing the Web, and having a ton of devices connected?

Gaming

If you do any sort of online gaming, even competitively, you’re going to want a really good Internet speed. This is because online gaming can be really demanding on your network, especially on a wireless connection — if you don’t have a good speed that can pull down a lot of data, you might notice high latency times and slow responses as you play. That’s not good for competitive gaming at all, and you might find that you lose because of those slow speeds.

If you do any sort of streaming your games online, you’ll need a good Internet speed as well. You don’t want to interfering with your gaming, so you need to make sure you have an Internet connection that can do some serious heavy lifting with both happening at the same time.

Generally, for gaming and streaming, you’re best off looking at obtaining a Gigabit connection, especially if there are other devices on your network and using it as well. With a speed of around 1000MBps, you should be able to handle all of that demand, even if others are on your network using Netflix or browsing the Web.

Video Streaming

If you’re just looking for a good Internet speed for using your favorite streaming services, such as Netflix or Hulu, you don’t need an extremely fast connection, unless you’re streaming 4K content. If you’re streaming 4K video, a Gigabit connection is good to have. However, if you’re just trying to get your favorite shows and movies in high definition quality, a 25MBps Internet speed will do just fine — if you’re trying to stream multiple instances of Netflix or Hulu on your network, you might want to upgrade to 50MBps for the most flawless experience, but you should still be fine with 25MBps.

Surfing the Web

For surfing the Web, you don’t need an extremely high-end Internet connection. Surfing the Web generally doesn’t take up that much data, so you should be completely fine with just a basic package here. 5MBps and even 10MBps will be more than enough for surfing the Web, whether that be on your laptop or smartphone. If you primarily visit websites through your smartphone, you want to consider a 10MBps connection. Not because there’s demand, but because apps on your smartphone can be rather large, and you want to be able to download them fast without much interruption.

For example, the Facebook app on iOS sits at close to 400MB. That’s a lot to download every time there’s an update, so a 10MBps connection will only hang your Facebook connection up for a couple of seconds. Even if multiple people in your home are surfing the Web and navigating apps, you should still be fine with a 5Mbps or 10Mbps connection, but we promise everyone will love the speed that 10Mbps has to offer.

Verdict

As you can see, Internet speeds you need vary depending on what you do on your network. If you use the Internet heavily for things like gaming, a good Internet package is going to cost you a bit of money. But,, for the rest of the world, you’ll be able to get away with a cheap 10Mbps or 5Mbps package easily.