What Is A Mbin Speed Whats The Normal Speed For Household

[hansons]

there is just me and the wife both use laptops we dont really need telephone and we can get tv from internet what is best speed for internet

[Kidas]

internet connection speed is usually measured in Mb/sec (megabits per second).

That's not quite the same as megabytes per second - you can divide the Mbit/sec speed by 10 to get an approximation for the MByte/sec.

To turn that into real-world insight, a large image off the internet might be 1 MByte in size.

So a 10Mbit/sec connection would download that in around a second.

If you have a short video file of 100MByte, that might take 10 seconds (a couple of minutes) to download (at 10MBit connection speed).

The typical household speeds vary enormously.

IN a house with a couple of older teenagers, you might need upwards of 50Mb/sec to cope with gaming and video streaming.

If all you are doing is looking at websites, and sending emails, then you might be able to get away with just a couple of Mbit/sec.

If you are tryin to get TV from the internet (such as iPlayer), then you probably need something a bit quicker. Video takes up quite a lot of capacity - a connection around 20MB could be enough.

Having said all that, outside the big cities, the actual speed you get is often lower than the advertised maximum speed. And depending on the service and its "contention ratio" your speed might drop if your neighbours are using a lot of internet bandwidth.

There are some good resources on the web.

Here's one from Which?

https://www.which.co.uk/reviews/broadband-deals/article/what-broadband-speed-do-i-need

Do a search on 'what internet speed do I need' or something similar.

If not, get back to us, there are a lot of techie people here who can help.

Good luck!

[Kidas]

Ahem! not ^^^10 seconds^^^ to download - 100 seconds

[Buenchico]

2 Mbps is the minimum speed you need to download video content (with just one computer or other internet-connected device) but 5 Mbps is better (still with one device).

So with 2 people possibly using the internet at the same time, 10 Mbps is probably the minimum speed which should be looking for. Unless you're going to be downloading lots of really big files, you won't actually gain a great deal by paying for speeds above that but, since 'fibre to the cabinet' services don't cost much more than 'ADSL 2+' ones these days, you might just as well go for a basic fibre package, offering perhaps 30 Mbps. (You'd hardly notice any difference by paying for, say, an 80 Mbps fibre service and you certainly don't need the 1000 Mbps service that's currently offered to just 3% of homes).