Cheat Sheet for Internet Speed When Working from Home 2021

Learn all you need to know about your Internet Speed while working remotely, so you can have optimal results and improve your performance. As working remotely has become more common especially in this time of the pandemic. But do you have the perfect internet speed to work from home and be more productive? And why is it necessary to have enough internet speed to keep the business running smoothly?

Video conferencing, sending emails or chat, web browsing or researching, stream media, and sharing large files are common tasks or duties of employees working remotely. Usually, the recommended internet speed for one person working at home is at least 10 Mbps for download and at least 1 Mbps for upload.

The reason why the recommended download speed is much higher than the upload speed is that the download speed receives the data being transferred from the internet to a specific computer, for example in a video conference, download speed receives the video from other people on the call, while upload speed is the data sent from a specific computer or machine out to a website or application on the internet, for example in a video conference, upload speed sends your video to other people during a call.

Internet Speed for Video Meetings:

Even if you are working from home, communication is still the most important key to run a business. And video conferencing allows you to have communication with your coworkers and run the meetings as usual. But how much internet speed do we really need for video conferencing applications? Video conference sends and receives real-time video and audio simultaneously. Here are the internet speeds you need to have a smooth conversation using video conferencing applications.

• Zoom one-on-one calling – Minimum speed of 600 Kbps for both download and upload speed
• Zoom group calling – Minimum of 800 Kbps for upload speed and 1 Mbps for download speed
• Google Hangouts and Google Meet – Minimum of 3.2 Mbps for upload and 1.8 Mbps for download speed
• Slack – Minimum speed of 600 Kbps for both download and upload speed
• Skype – Minimum speed of 128 Kbps for both download and upload speed

For video conferencing, it’s not just the download and upload speed matters, but also the latency since it affects how your connections synchronize with each other. If you have high latency, you may experience distortion or lag during your call. Usually, it works best with less than 150 ms of latency.

Aside from video conferencing, sending chats and emails is common for employees working remotely. But how much internet speed do you need for chat and email applications to work smoothly? Thankfully, it doesn’t need more internet speed and 1 Mbps of internet bandwidth per instance is enough.

How about the internet speed you need for browsing the web? 5 Mbps of download speed is recommended for heavy web browsing and using different sites. Because you just download the content once and don’t take a continuous stream of data as long as you are on that page.

If you are going to stream music or movie, either you while working or somebody else in your house, here’s the minimum speed needed per application:

• Streaming music on Pandora or Spotify – Minimum download speed of 1 Mbps
• Streaming music or video on Youtube – Minimum download speed of 2 Mbps
• Streaming video on Netflix, Hulu, etc – Minimum download of 5 Mbps

Sharing of large files needs a faster internet connection for your work to be much faster and smoother. For example, if you download a high-resolution image file (5 MB) it will take 4 seconds to upload if you have – 10 Mbps download speed and 1 Mbps upload speed, 1 second if you have 25 Mbps for download speed, and 3 Mbps for upload speed and less than 1 second to upload if you have 100 or more Mbps for download speed and 10 Mbps or more for upload speed.

If your internet connection is not strong enough to handle these tasks, you need to upgrade to a better internet service provider, at My1Wifi.com we offer a variety of internet plans that delivery excellent internet speed at a very affordable price, we also offer a variety of Hotspot devices that can improve your internet speed dramatically, if you’d like to learn more please visit our online store.

The speed of your internet connection should have depended on what you do during work, the applications you are using, and how many people or devices connected to your internet connection. But what if even after considering those, your internet speed is still not fast enough? You should run a speed test on the device that you’ll be using and if it’s not the speed you are paying for, try to place your Wi-Fi router on an area or spot where you have better coverage. An open and elevated space in your house is mostly the recommended spot for optima signal boost. You may also try to restart or reboot your router then try to reconnect.

In case, the recommendations mentioned above still don’t help you increase the speed of your internet, you may try to use a WiFi extender or WiFi repeater since it receives the wireless signal and rebroadcasts it farther in your house. However, a wireless mesh network is recommended for houses with several interior brick walls. But you also have to keep in mind that the number of people connected to your internet is also a big factor that affects the speed of your internet. So you can set up a strong Wi-Fi password so that no uninvited guest can’t connect to your WiFi network or consider upgrading your internet service plan that better fits your needs.