What internet speed does my business actually need?

This is one of the most common questions we get, and the honest answer is: it depends far more on what you run than on headcount. A 5-person accounting firm running cloud accounting software needs less bandwidth than a 5-person video production studio.

Start With What You Actually Run

Rather than picking a speed and hoping it's enough, work backward from your actual applications:

• Email and web browsing, light, a few Mbps per concurrent user is generally sufficient
• VoIP calls, roughly 100kbps per concurrent call; a 20-person office with 5 people on calls simultaneously needs about 500kbps just for voice
• Video conferencing, 1 to 3Mbps per participant depending on video quality; this adds up fast in a business running frequent Teams or Zoom calls
• Cloud applications (Microsoft 365, cloud accounting, CRM), moderate, but latency matters as much as raw speed here
• File uploads/downloads, backups, this is where businesses most often get caught out, a nightly cloud backup of a few hundred GB needs real upload bandwidth, not just download speed
• CCTV and IoT devices, frequently overlooked, but security cameras streaming continuously can consume significant bandwidth around the clock

Upload Speed Is Usually the Overlooked Bottleneck

Most businesses fixate on download speed since that's what's advertised prominently, but for cloud backups, video calls, and VoIP, upload speed matters just as much, sometimes more. This is one reason fibre (with symmetrical speeds) often outperforms asymmetric connections even at a nominally similar download speed rating.

A Rough Sizing Guide

As a starting point for planning, not a strict rule: a small office of 5 to 10 people doing general office work comfortably runs on 20 to 50Mbps. A 20 to 50 person office running VoIP, video calls and cloud applications typically needs 100Mbps or more. Businesses with heavy file transfer, video production, or large-scale cloud backup needs often justify 200Mbps and up. These are starting points, actual sizing should account for your specific application mix.

Why Oversizing Slightly Is Usually Worth It

Connectivity is one of the few IT costs where the gap between "just enough" and "comfortably enough" is often a relatively small monthly difference, while the cost of being undersized (frustrated staff, dropped calls, slow cloud tools) is a real, ongoing productivity drag. We generally recommend sizing with headroom rather than cutting it precisely to current measured usage.

Our Approach

Rather than quoting a speed based on headcount alone, we ask what you actually run day to day, VoIP seats, cloud platforms, backup schedules, camera counts, and size a recommendation around that. If you're not sure, we can also review your current usage data if you already have a connection in place, to size the next plan based on real numbers rather than guesswork.