Free broadband speed test: Pulse

For one to two people who browse and stream in HD, 30 to 100 Mbps is comfortable. Busy households streaming in 4K, gaming and taking video calls at the same time sit best between 100 and 300 Mbps. Large households, smart homes and heavy home working suit 300 Mbps and up. Full fibre now reaches 82% of UK homes, so faster options are available to most addresses.

It is workable for a small household: HD streaming, browsing and video calls are all comfortable. It gets tight when several people stream, game and take calls at once, and 4K plus busy evenings will stretch it. Full fibre deals often cost less than older part fibre packages, so it is worth comparing at your postcode.

The usual suspects are the Wi-Fi rather than the broadband itself, an older copper or part fibre line, peak-time congestion between 8 and 10pm, or bufferbloat, where a busy line makes everything queue. Run the Pulse test, then use the router check to see whether your Wi-Fi or your line is the bottleneck.

Wi-Fi loses pace with distance, walls and interference, and older devices cap out below what the line can carry. Testing next to the router on the 5 GHz band shows what your line can really do. If the near-router result is much faster, the fix is router placement or kit, not a new provider.

Broadband is sold in megabits per second (Mbps). Downloads usually display in megabytes per second (MB/s). There are eight bits in a byte, so divide your Mbps result by eight: a 40 Mbps connection downloads at about 5 MB/s. More jargon busting in the broadband glossary.

As comfortable working speeds: HD streaming from 5 Mbps and 4K from 25 Mbps per stream, group video calls from 10 Mbps, and cloud gaming in 4K from about 45 Mbps. Gaming itself needs little bandwidth but loves low, steady lag, which is why Pulse measures lag while the line is busy.

Bufferbloat is when a busy line makes lag balloon: everything that needs a quick answer queues behind heavy traffic. It is why video calls stutter while someone else streams or downloads. Pulse measures your lag at full load and grades the rise A+ to F.

Lag is how long your line takes to answer a tiny request when it is quiet, measured in milliseconds. Under about 30 ms feels instant, up to about 60 ms is good for calls and gaming, and over 100 ms starts to feel sluggish. The technical name is idle latency, or ping.

Under Ofcom’s Broadband Speeds Code of Practice, if your speed falls below the guaranteed minimum in your contract, providers signed up to the code have 30 days to fix it. After that you can leave penalty free, even mid-contract. Keep a record of your Pulse results as evidence, and check whether automatic compensation applies too.

Start with your provider’s complaints process and share your speed test results. If it is unresolved after six weeks, or you receive a deadlock letter, you can escalate free of charge to the Communications Ombudsman or CISAS, whichever scheme your provider belongs to.

Test more than once. A quiet morning run shows your line at its best, and a run between 8 and 10pm, the window Ofcom uses for peak measurement, shows what you actually live with in the evening. Comparing the two reveals congestion.

No. Pulse measures download, lag, lag under load and steadiness: the measurements that shape how your connection feels day to day. If upload matters for your work, our upload versus download guide explains what to compare when switching.

No. Your result stays on your screen. Pulse sets no cookies, stores nothing in your browser and sends nothing to us: the only connection it makes is to the public speed endpoint it downloads from. Copy your result or keep the reference for your records or a complaint.