What is broadband speed

In this case, switching to a fibre connection will help. However, if you already have fibre and your service is slow, you may be better looking at a 4G or 5G home broadband service instead. For more information about how the distance from the exchange can impact your broadband speed, read our guide.

You can refer back to the estimated speed you were given when you signed up to get an idea of the speed you should be getting. Average download speeds for broadband can be affected by a number of factors. These include how far your home is from the nearest cabinet and telephone exchange, whether your standard broadband is operating along old or damaged copper wires, and what types of broadband are available in your area.

Our postcode address checker can quickly tell you what speeds and types of broadband can be accessed where you are in the UK. Check broadband in my area. Generally a good internet or broadband speed is around 11Mbps for standard broadband.

A faster broadband speed would be between 11Mbps and 50Mbps. A very fast broadband speed would be Mbps or higher. For low usage households, browsing or shopping online will be fine. It also depends on how you use your broadband and the number of people in your household. Lots of devices, streaming and more than two people — we would recommend a minimum of at least 30Mbps.

Broadband speeds are dependent on where you live in the UK. To find out, check out our broadband in my area page. Simply enter your postcode and we'll show you the broadband speeds in your area. Mbps or megabits per second is the download or upload speed of your broadband connection.

Without getting too technical — the higher your Mbps, the better experience you will have browsing the internet or streaming movies. The more devices and people you have connected, the higher your Mbps needs to be. As a result of the increasing availability of ultrafast services across the UK, the average broadband speed is now around 80Mbps. However, many people can still not get access to these high speed connections so if you can get Mbps, you are one of the lucky ones!

This website uses cookies to give you the best experience. By continuing, you agree to our cookies policy. About us Contact us Media centre. Home Broadband Guides. What broadband speed do I need? Households of people Recommended speed: 10Mbps. Bits tend to be abbreviated to lower case b while bytes are abbreviated to upper case B, so a MB is very different to a Mb.

There are 8 bits to 1 byte, bytes to the kilobyte and kilobytes to the megabyte. This means that there are actually 1,, bytes or 8,, bits in a megabyte. File transfer speed, as reported during a download, is likely to be measured in megabytes per second rather than megabits per second, which means this is more than 8 times slower than you might expect if you thought megabits and megabytes were equivalent.

In reality a 38Mb fibre broadband connection can only download a file at 4. However for most webpages that's immediate loading, and for the average music album download, that's approximately one track per second.

You'd also be able to download the average standard definition movie in just 3. Obviously on a 76Mb connection these times are roughly halved or a little over. We often get asked why broadband speed checkers sometimes report download speeds slower than the maximum theoretically possible at a property.

We've compiled a list of some of the causes of slow broadband connections. You can use our broadband speed test to test your speeds at any time. We suggest you try speed tests a number of times over a period before reporting issues to your providers technical support.

If you're a heavy downloader then faster speeds will certainly allow you to download more files more quickly. If you stream videos, TV shows and films over your connection then download speeds of 5Mb or over should allow high definition content without buffering.

However if you live in a home with more than one Internet user, perhaps other family members or housemates, then you can quickly discover that you need several times that at times when everyone's using your connection, especially if more than one of you wants to stream video. If you currently experience regular buffering of videos and slowdowns when other people are using your connection then you'd also very likely benefit from a speed upgrade.

If you're not currently using a cable or fibre service then switching from standard broadband to a superfast connection will most definitely produce a significant speed improvement. If you're already on cable or fibre and on a slower package, this speed reduction is likely to be artificially enforced.

Switching to a package with a higher speed limit will likely see a significant increase in your speeds. On Virgin Media cable services this is likely to always be the case, as their lines are rated to be able to achieve the maximum speeds.

On a fibre to the cabinet service such as BT Infinity , your distance from the street cabinet can reduce the maximum speed that your line can support. If you're currently on a half speed up to 38Mb service and currently seeing less that 38Mb then it's unlikely that you'll be able to benefit from switching to a faster package. If you get the full 38Mb then you still may not get the full 76Mb when you upgrade but instead get a lower figure between those two, determined by your line length.

If you're unsure about this, your provider will be able to give you an accurate estimate of the maximum speed your line can support. If you're only able to switch from one standard phoneline broadband service to another then speed changes are unlikely to be as significant as switching from one broadband technology to another.

However if you're on a smaller budget provider then factors such as traffic management and peak time congestion may be slowing you down either due to artificial limits or the supplier's network capacity being saturated.

In this case switching to a more expensive small provider with a better reputation, or switching to a larger supplier who has invested in their network capacity to allow them to advertise a 'truly unlimited' service may result in faster download speeds at peak times i.

However this is unlikely to be a very significant improvement, no more than increasing your evening speed to what you're currently able to achieve at off peak times like the early morning. If this is the case then LLU providers like TalkTalk or Sky may have put their own equipment into your exchange, allowing you to possibly get increases in speed of more than double.

However the size of this increase will depend on line length in terms of distance from the telephone exchange. If you're currently seeing maximum speeds of 7. If you feel standard broadband is adequate for you, use our standard broadband reviews to find the perfect package. However, it's worth keeping in mind that, while fibre broadband used to be pricier than standard broadband, it is now competitively priced - and some faster fibre deals can actually be cheaper than standard broadband.

If you're interested in fibre broadband, it's worth noting that very few "fibre" packages actually offer a fibre connection from your house all the way through to the exchange. Instead the vast majority use fibre to connect the exchange to the cabinet in your street and then switch to the phone line for the final leg into your house. Compare these broadband deals using our super fast fibre broadband and ultra fast fibre broadband reviews. Learn more about this 'gigabit' broadband in our guide on the benefits of fibre broadband.

Fast speeds allow for quicker downloads, uninterrupted streaming and also help to reduce the problems caused when different family members log on at the same time.

They let you seamlessly enjoy services such as online radio, video on-demand and catch-up TV at the same time, while fibre's faster upload speeds also make life easier when you're sharing photos online or making video calls for work. As the table below illustrates, at its fastest the difference between downloading a film from a service such as iTunes is about 90 seconds for fibre optic vs around 20 minutes for ADSL.

A good fibre connection should put an end to any stuttering and buffering of on-demand TV, too. Check the speed of your broadband package with our broadband speed checker. Superfast broadband is now very competitively priced when compared to standard broadband. Standard broadband can be adequate for browsing the web, checking emails, uploading the odd photo to Facebook and even streaming from BBC iPlayer or Netflix, but it's worth checking you can't get a more affordable superfast deal before committing.

For iPlayer you need 2Mbps of sustained bandwidth to watch standard-definition content or 3Mbps for high-definition, while the minimum recommended broadband speed for Netflix is 1. However, you will likely benefit from a speedier connection if you regularly:. Keep in mind that fibre doesn't only offer faster speeds - fibre connections are usually more reliable too, so it's worth considering upgrading if your standard connection drops out regularly. Compare the packages on offer using our superfast fibre broadband reviews.

A connection is generally considered 'ultrafast' if it's Mbps or faster. Some of the providers that use the Openreach network - such as BT and TalkTalk - offer ultrafast connections, but only to customers in certain parts of the country. Virgin Media is one major provider that doesn't use the Openreach network. Instead it uses its own fibre optic cables to connect its street cabinets to the phone exchange and then uses coaxial cables to link the cabinet to customers' homes.

Coaxial cable is faster than standard phone lines, so most of Virgin Media's deals are ultrafast. While it's less widely available than Virgin Media, Hyperoptic is another provider with its own fibre network - it's mainly available in apartment blocks in major centres.

Find a speedy great-value package by browsing our ultrafast fibre broadband reviews. Speed is clearly important. But the reality is that not all of us will get the average speeds that providers quote in their ads. We're pleased that this change has been made, but we think there's still more that could be done to improve broadband in the UK.