A speed between 50 Mbps and 100 Mbps is pretty average for homes with three or four people.If you’re streaming 4K video and you’re worried about lag, a 25 Mbps internet speed should be the minimum. It’s a decent speed for small homes with one or two people, as it’ll be fine for using a few devices to stream Netflix, watch 1080 YouTube videos, FaceTime calling, play online video games, and browse the web. A 25 Mbps download speed should be your first barometer.

If the only thing on your Wi-Fi is your phone, you are going to see the absolute best-case highs. If you’ve got 7 Xboxes all currently downloading games, your number is going to show more of a worse case scenario. The results you get are a good rule of thumb, but are dependent on how many devices on your network are using a share of the bandwidth. Upload speeds are important though, for things like gaming and video chat, but the demands on your network are generally much lower and more situational. The download speed is the more important of the two stats for streaming and other tasks and will almost certainly be higher than your upload speeds. Once you run a speed test, it will let you know your download and upload speeds in Mbps. It takes less than 30 seconds and it’s free. We recommend going to SpeedTest or Google’s own speed test.

To check the speed of your connection, all you have to do is run a speed test on your device. Both are generally measured in Megabits or Gigabits per second (M/Gbps). Bandwidth is the size of the pipe, while speed is the, well, speed of the data flowing through it. The speed of the internet on a given device is the rate you download (or upload) something from the internet. First, a clarification of terms: there’s a difference between what you generally experience as “speed” and “bandwidth.” The bandwidth of your network is the maximum amount of data that your entire home can handle downloading (or uploading) at once.

What is normal mbps download speeds