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How fast is my broadband and how is its speed measured?
Almost every internet service provider in the world claims to have superfast broadband speeds. It’s their biggest selling point and the key thing which most consumers are looking for when shopping for a new broadband service. You might be asking, then, how exactly broadband speed is measured.
Put simply, broadband speed is the rate at which your internet connection is able to access websites, transfer information and download data. It is measured in terms of download speed, upload speed, and ‘ping’ rate; we’ll get to what these mean later on.
You can get a rough idea of how fast or slow your connection is by observing how long it takes to buffer a 1080p video or complete a download. However, while those observations can give you an indication as to whether you have a poor broadband connection, they're hardly a scientific measurement.
In this article, we'll explain what broadband speed you need for different purposes, and show you how you can test your own.
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What is a good broadband speed?
Well, that depends on what you want to use your broadband for. Broadband actually encompasses a range of technologies which, for over a decade, have made up the standard form of internet connection. All these technologies have one in thing in common; they allow for a high-speed, always-on connection, as opposed to the old dial-up connections, now only found lurking in the darkest corners of the dankest basements.
These days broadband speeds are measured in Megabits per second (Mbits/sec), with the headline figure (up to 100Mbits/sec) referring to the download speed. At the bare minimum, you’ll need a 2Mbits/sec connection to browse the web, or a 5Mbits/sec connection to stream video acceptably. Of course, it’s likely that you’ll also want to view HD streaming services, and will, therefore, need nearer 10Mbits/sec.
For online gaming, 5Mbits/sec should be enough for most games, as the ping – the delay between data leaving a server and arriving at your computer – is more crucial than absolute speed. However, you’ll need much more if you’re keen on the idea of streaming your gameplay to sites such as Twitch, while game downloads and updates will make you glad of a 20Mbits/sec or above connection. For 4K video streaming, you’ll generally need something in the region of 15-25Mbits/sec, so you'll want to forgo a standard ADSL connection and opt for a fibre broadband package instead.
What should I do if my broadband speed is slower than it should be?
Many internet providers such as Sky Broadband, BT Broadband, and Virgin Media Broadband will avoid promising their customers a specific broadband speed. Instead of saying, ‘you will have a broadband speed of XX’ they’ll word it as, ‘you could have a broadband speed of up to XX’. This is a practical method of preventing countless claims from customers over breach of contract if the broadband speed drops below a certain amount. Instead, they give you a range of possible speeds, based on your connection when they test it and your distance from the nearest cabinet and exchange.
If your speed happens to be on the lowest possible end of that range, you haven’t really got any grounds for complaining, but you should probably switch providers – we’ve made up a list here of the best broadband internet providers in the UK.
Check your broadband contract to find out exactly what they promised you when you signed up, and compare that with the results of our speed checker. If your actual speeds are consistently lower than the lowest range listed in the contract, then you have grounds to cancel your agreement with your provider and move on without being penalised.
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How do I check my broadband speed?
By using our handy broadband speed checker, of course! You’ve almost certainly done it by now already, but if not, go ahead: scroll to the top of this article and then click the button beneath the Speedometer which says ‘Start Test’. It will then takes a few seconds to examine your broadband connection and give you three individual results, which we mentioned earlier. We’ll break down exactly what those results say about your broadband speed.
What do the results of my broadband speed test mean?
The test breaks down your broadband speed into three separate readings, which are as follows:
Download
This is the one that matters most. First of all, it is important not to confuse Mbps (megabits per second) with MB (megabytes). The former is a measurement of bandwidth over a connection, while the latter relates to file sizes. They are connected, of course, because the more Mbps your Internet connection handles, the faster you can download a file of so many MB.
A 17Mbits/sec internet speed means a download speed of roughly 2MB per second, while a 38Mbit/sec fibre-optic broadband will allow download speeds of just under 5MB per second. A high-performance 100Mbits/sec broadband speed will give you a download rate of around 12MB per second. That’s pretty darn fast.
Upload
This figure tells you how quickly (or slowly) you can upload files such as photos or videos onto the internet. Don’t worry if your upload speed is much, much slower than your download speed, as that’s the case with all broadband connections and is inherent to the way they’re delivered. Broadband connection speeds are generally designed to be asymmetric, as most people need to download far more data than they upload, and therefore don’t require the same speed in both directions.
Ping
The Ping is the reaction time, or the time it takes to get a response back to whatever device you have connected from your ISP or any server that you connect to through your broadband. Ping is measured in milliseconds (ms), and unlike download and upload speeds above, the lower the better. Anything above 60ms is worrying, and that’s sort of the bare minimum that you could expect. PC and console gamers will be after the lowest possible ms reading, as fast-paced games need low response times – 20ms and below is excellent.
How does the Expert Reviews broadband speed checker work?
Our speed checker tests the real-time connection of your local network by simulating downloads and uploads using your broadband connection. Do bear in mind that results will fluctuate based on a range of extraneous variables, most prominent of which is the number of users in your home using the broadband connection and the number of devices, applications and services you have using it at the time.
Its speed is also affected by the number of users in your local area, and how much data they're downloading at any one time. So, to get a true reading of your broadband speed we recommend you test it at several times during the day, including peak times such as the early evenings where the most people will be online. If you stream Netflix, download music and games, and trawl through Reddit most evenings, test it out then. This will give you an idea of the download and upload speeds you’re getting at the times that matter to you.