The Importance of the Internet

Having affordable, reliable, and fast internet can improve your access to more jobs and job training, better health care, quality education, and so much more.

How much speed do you need in your home?

Your internet connection needs will be based on several different things including your job, if your kids are learning online, and mainly how many people are using internet in your home at the same time.

Highspeedinternet.com recommends the following minimum internet speeds one person working or learning from home:

  • At least 10 Mbps download speed per person

  • At least 1 Mbps upload speed per person

For each person in the home that is using a video call application, like Zoom:

You need 8 Mbps of download speed for each person.

Video calls require sending and receiving real-time video at the same time, so there are a few internet speed factors you should keep in mind to get the most out of your remote meetings. These are download speed, upload speed, and latency:

  • Download speed affects how well your connection receives video from other people on the call.

  • Upload speed affects how well your connection can send your video stream to others.

  • Latency affects how well your connections synchronize with each other, and high latency can distort calls and cause lag.

You can’t control your connection’s latency as directly as you can change your speed by upgrading, but know that lower latency is better. Moreover, certain types of internet connections (like fiber) tend to have lower latency than others (like satellite internet).

Email

You need only about 1 Mbps of internet bandwidth per instance for chat and email. 

However, if you are trying to send photos or videos, or download bigger attachments, you will need more internet bandwidth.

Internet browsing

We recommend about 5 Mbps of download speed per person for heavy web browsing and jumping between sites.

Streaming TV and watching shows

We recommend 5 Gbps of download speed at a minimum per person for streaming media.

If you stream music or have a show streaming in the background while you work (or someone else in your house is binge-watching all of Sailor Moon on Hulu), make sure to factor that into how much internet you need to work from home effectively. This is especially important for video services like YouTube or Netflix because video can be a bit of a bandwidth hog.