What Is a Good Internet Speed?
“Good” depends entirely on what you’re doing with it — here are real thresholds, not a single magic number.
There is no single good speed
ISPs sell speed as one number, but almost nothing you do online needs your full plan speed at once. A household streaming one 4K show needs 25 Mbps; the same household on a video call needs a fraction of that but is far more sensitive to latency and jitter. Buying more Mbps than your actual use case requires doesn’t fix stutter or lag caused by bufferbloat — it just makes the bill bigger.
Thresholds by use case
These are the exact thresholds netgauge uses to grade your result pass/fail for each use case:
Netflix, YouTube, and similar services recommend this floor per stream — double it if two people in the house stream 4K at once.
Calls are symmetric — upload matters as much as download — and jittery latency causes the choppy audio and frozen video frames people blame on "bad wifi."
Raw Mbps barely matters here. A 20 ms-ping gigabit line with bad bufferbloat will lag worse under load than a 100 Mbps line with a well-managed queue.
Cloud backups, large file transfers, and screen-sharing during calls all hinge on upload — the number most plans advertise the least prominently.
Multiple people, multiple devices
These thresholds are per activity, not per household — they stack. A household with one 4K stream, one video call, and a background cloud backup running at once needs roughly the sum of each: about 25 Mbps download for the stream, 4 Mbps down / 4 Mbps up for the call, and 10 Mbps up for the backup, plus some headroom so none of them saturates the line and drags the others into bufferbloat.
Getting a number below your plan?
A gap between your plan speed and your test result is common and usually explainable — see why your internet is slower than advertised for the most frequent causes.
See how your connection stacks up
Run a test and netgauge will grade your result against each of these use cases automatically, alongside your bufferbloat grade.
Test your connection →