Business Internet Bandwidth Planner
Tell us how your team uses the internet at its busiest. We'll add up the download and upload speed you need using the figures Microsoft, Zoom, Google and others publish, add headroom, and show which UK connections fit, including the upload speed that broadband adverts tend to hide.
- Download and upload
- Published per-app figures
- UK connection types
What you need
Where it goes
Download
Upload
UK connections that fit
Typical sold speeds, download / upload. Providers often sell Openreach full fibre under rounder names.
| Connection | Down / up | Fits? |
|---|
Backup lines
When the main line fails, a backup line keeps phones, card machines and cloud apps working. Many business routers switch over automatically.
Why upload matters for businesses
- Home broadband is built for downloading. A 500 Mbps full fibre line usually uploads at only 75 Mbps, and part-fibre at 20 Mbps at best.
- Businesses send a lot: your camera on every video call, every file saved to OneDrive, SharePoint or Google Drive, cloud backups, CCTV and phone calls.
- When upload fills up, everything slows down, not just the upload. Calls stutter and web pages stall, because the replies your computer sends get stuck in the queue.
- Symmetric full fibre and leased lines upload as fast as they download.
Is a backup line worth it?
- If your phones, tills or cloud software stop when the internet does, a backup line usually pays for itself the first time the main line fails.
- 4G or 5G is cheap and quick to add. Starlink works almost anywhere. A second fixed line from a different provider is best for bigger offices.
- Leased lines come with a fix-time guarantee, often within a few hours, while home and small business broadband repairs can take days.
- Landline phones are moving to the internet: the old analogue network is due to close on 31 January 2027, so your phones will depend on your broadband.
Check your current line
- Test your real speed and how much lag builds up when the line is busy with our True Speed & Lag Test.
- Catch dropouts and lag spikes that ruin calls with the Internet Stability Checker.
- Size your first full cloud backup and restore times with the Backup Size & Storage Planner.
Where the figures come from
- Video calls: Microsoft's Teams network planning guide, Zoom's system requirements and Google's Meet network guide.
- Phone calls: Cisco's per-call figures (87.2 kbps each way for G.711, 31.2 kbps for G.729, including network overhead).
- Streaming: Netflix (5 Mbps for 1080p, 15 Mbps for 4K) and YouTube (20 Mbps for 4K). Cloud gaming: Xbox's recommended 20 Mbps.
- CCTV: typical camera bitrates from manufacturers' recommended settings. Your cameras may differ, so check their settings.
- Office apps (1.5 Mbps down, 0.5 Mbps up per person) and guest devices (2 Mbps down, 0.5 Mbps up) are our own rules of thumb for busy times. Neither Microsoft nor Google publishes a single figure.