What is a good internet speed?
A guide to how many Mbps you need for streaming, gaming, video calls and working from home.
The short answer
For most homes, 100 Mbps download is a good internet speed. It covers 4K streaming, video calls and several devices at once. One or two people can manage on 25–50 Mbps. Larger households or heavy uploads call for 300 Mbps or more.
Speed is only part of the picture. Ping, jitter and upload speed decide how calls and games feel, so test all of them. Run the speed test and compare your numbers with the tables below.
How many Mbps do you need for each activity?
| Activity | What it needs |
|---|---|
| HD video streaming | About 5 Mbps down |
| 4K streaming | About 25 Mbps down per stream |
| Video calls | 3 Mbps or more up, ping under 100 ms, low jitter |
| Online gaming | 3–10 Mbps, but ping under 50 ms and jitter under 15 ms matter more |
| Working from home | 25–50 Mbps down and 5–10 Mbps up |
| Cloud backup and big uploads | 50 Mbps or more up is comfortable |
These are rules of thumb. Add the needs of everything running at the same time.
Good internet speed by household size
| Household | Good download speed |
|---|---|
| 1 person | 25–50 Mbps |
| 2 people | 50–100 Mbps |
| 3–4 people | 100–300 Mbps |
| 5 or more, or heavy use | 300–1,000 Mbps |
What is a good internet speed for gaming?
Online games send small packets and need almost no bandwidth, so the download number matters less than for streaming. What counts is a ping under 50 ms, jitter under 15 ms and a bufferbloat grade of B or better. The bufferbloat test shows whether other traffic in your home causes lag spikes, and what a good ping is explains the numbers.
Speed does matter for game downloads. A 100 GB game takes about 2 hours 13 minutes at 100 Mbps. Try your own numbers in the download time calculator.
Download vs upload speed
Download speed is how fast you receive data: streaming, browsing, downloads. Upload speed is how fast you send it: video calls, cloud backups, posting video. Many cable plans are sold with a fast download and a slow upload, so check both numbers in your results. Mbps are megabits, not megabytes; see the conversion.
Questions
Is 100 Mbps a good internet speed?
Yes. 100 Mbps comfortably handles 4K streaming, video calls and general use for a household of three or four people, as long as ping and upload are healthy.
Is 50 Mbps enough for one person?
Yes. 50 Mbps covers 4K streaming, video calls and gaming for one or two people. It gets tight when several people stream or upload at once.
What is a good upload speed?
10 Mbps up is enough for video calls and regular work. 50 Mbps or more is comfortable for cloud backups, large uploads and streaming your own video.
Does a faster plan fix lag?
Not always. Lag comes from ping, jitter and bufferbloat, not only from Mbps. A 1 Gbps plan with a bad bufferbloat grade can still stutter in calls and games.
What is a good internet speed for gaming?
Games use little bandwidth, about 3 to 10 Mbps. What matters is ping under 50 ms, jitter under 15 ms and a bufferbloat grade of B or better. Large game downloads are the exception: 100 GB takes about 2 hours 13 minutes at 100 Mbps.
More from Speedhound
- Speed testDownload, upload, ping, jitter and bufferbloat in 20 seconds.
- Bufferbloat testSee how much lag your connection adds under load.
- Download time calculatorHow long a file takes at your speed.
- Good pingWhat ping, jitter and packet loss numbers mean.