Advanced options
Per-use guide: 4K streaming ~25Mbps, HD ~5Mbps, video calls ~3Mbps, gaming ~3Mbps (gaming needs low latency far more than speed; downloads of the games themselves are another matter). Browsing and music barely register. If everyone's evening habits never overlap, your true peak is lower than the sum.
What The Broadband Speed Calculator Works Out
- Speed you need: adds up every simultaneous use at its typical bitrate (4K streaming 25 Mbps, HD 5 Mbps, a video call 3 Mbps, a gamer 3 Mbps) and adds 25% headroom. A busy family evening of two streams, a call and a gamer peaks around 60 Mbps, which is why most UK households never notice the jump from a 70 Mbps package to a 900 Mbps one.
- Recommended package: maps the figure to the tiers UK providers actually sell: basic fibre (30-36 Mbps), superfast FTTC (60-70 Mbps, tops out around 80 and degrades with line length), 100-150 Mbps, full fibre 300-500 Mbps and 900 Mbps+. Full fibre delivers its numbers regardless of distance from the cabinet.
- Breakdown: the line-by-line sum behind the figure, so you can see which use dominates. Browsing, music and email barely register; one 4K stream outweighs five HD ones.
- Mbps per use (advanced): edit the per-stream, per-call and per-gamer assumptions. Streaming services typically quote 15-25 Mbps for 4K and 3-5 Mbps for HD; group video calls can reach 4-6 Mbps when everyone has their camera on.
- Other connected devices and headroom (advanced): phones, tablets, smart speakers and cameras idling in the background are counted at about 1 Mbps each, and you can raise or lower the 25% headroom. More headroom suits households whose peaks genuinely overlap every evening.
- Headline speed to shop for (advanced): the sold figure is measured to the router, and the Wi-Fi hop to an ageing router in a cupboard typically loses 30-50% of it. Enter a loss percentage and the calculator grosses up the package speed you should buy so the needed speed still reaches your devices. Spending on a better router or mesh discs is often cheaper than the next tier.
- Upload speed you need (advanced): video calls send roughly as much as they receive and gaming uploads about 1 Mbps, so this is the figure that matters for the serial video-caller, the streamer and the cloud-backup household. FTTC uploads are often only 10-20 Mbps; full fibre offers far more.
- Your current package (advanced): compares the speed on your bill with the headline speed you should be buying and shows the surplus or shortfall. A large surplus is a sign you could drop a tier at renewal; a shortfall explains the buffering.
- Price per Mbps you use (advanced): your monthly price divided by the speed you actually need (capped at what the package delivers). It makes the cost of paying for unused bandwidth visible. Remember Ofcom's speed code lets you leave penalty-free if a guaranteed minimum speed is missed, and social tariffs give benefit recipients the same connection at roughly half the price.
Further reading: Ofcom: phones and broadband.