What Internet Speed Do You Need?

You may have the fastest internet connection in the world, but you should also be aware of what your download limit is. Now in some countries, this is explicit. That is to say that when you sign up for internet services, the ISP will give you a data transfer allowance.

That means that only a certain amount of data can be downloaded for the monthly fee you pay to your ISP, beyond that, the ISP will charge for every megabyte downloaded..

In the UK Fixed line ISP’s generally have no explicit data transfer limits, but do monitor usage, and for those who download a lot of data or are hogging bandwidth, their speeds tend to get choked by the ISP. If you are accessing the internet from a mobile device, then it is more than likely that your provider will have some data transfer limits.

So what speed do you need? well that really depends on the kind of internet usage you expect to engage in, below is a rough guide to speeds and what certain speeds would be most suitable for.

512 kbit/s

Most ISP’s will have a 512 kilobit per second service. This may be fairly slow, and some people may wonder what is the point. If you rarely use the internet and just check emails occasionally, then this type of connection is more than adequate.

If you want to do more than that, for example listen to music or watch video, you will need a faster connection.

More importantly it is really cheap, and I personally have a spare 512 kilobit per second connection from another ISP as backup,  just in case my main internet connection ever goes down (which happens more often than I would like unfortunately)

One to Two Megabits/s

This speed is common in many homes and small businesses; however the average speed of connection to the internet is getting faster by the day.

An internet connection of this speed is pretty much good enough to do most things on the internet, from just general surfing, to posting on Facebook, reading the news, and streaming music or video.

At its fastest it takes about 40 seconds to download a 5 minute long song.

Eight to Twenty Four Megabit/s +

Many would argue that a lightning fast connection will mean that loading web pages, even the most content heavy ones will be instantaneous, as will downloading audio and video.

The truth is and I speak from experience, you cannot really tell there is that much difference between a one or 2 Mbps connection, because no matter how fast you can download, you are still at the mercy of the speed of the source that you are downloading from.

If for example you download a video from a site, that only uploads a single file at 2 Mbps, then that is the fastest download you are going to get for that file, no matter how fast your internet connection is.

To make full use of your bandwidth you will need to download multiple files, and only then will you utilize the speeds you have available.

So if you are doing a ton of file sharing, are heavy on the game play, or heaven forbid, download torrents, this is the type of connection for you.

Please Note - All Prices Quoted Are Correct at Time of Posting

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