What broadband speed do I need? The figures the services actually publish

What each service actually publishes

Direct answer: Netflix asks for 15 Mbps for a 4K film and 5 for Full HD. YouTube asks for the same 5. Nothing any streaming or calling service publishes is bigger than 20 Mbps.

Every figure below was read from the service's own site rather than from another speed table. That sounds like a low bar for a page whose whole subject is numbers. It is not the bar the version of this page before it cleared, and when you do it the numbers come out a long way below what almost everyone quotes.

Streaming, per stream

Netflix publishes three and routes every other page to them: 3 Mbps or higher for 720p, 5 Mbps or higher for 1080p Full HD and 15 Mbps or higher for 4K. YouTube gives 20 Mbps for 4K and 5 Mbps for 1080p, which matches Netflix exactly and is the strongest corroboration on this page. Two companies with different codecs, different libraries and no reason to agree arriving at the same number is worth more than any single source.

Two UK services publish a single blanket figure instead of a ladder. ITVX says “We recommend a connection speed of 10 Mbps or more for stable streaming.” NOW says “To watch NOW using Wi-Fi or broadband, you need a speed of at least 2.5Mbps.” Those are not comparable with Netflix's 1080p figure, because neither tells you which quality it is for, and a page that sets them side by side as though they were is guessing.

The data figure almost nobody quotes

Netflix is the only service in this research that publishes data use per hour, and if you are on a capped connection or a mobile plan it is far more useful than a speed. Per device per hour it gives up to 3 GB for high definition and up to 7 GB for 4K.

Music, which barely counts

Spotify's highest standard tier is approximately 320kbit/s, about a third of one megabit. A household streaming music in every room is still using less than one person watching a single Full HD film.

Three services we would have liked to include are missing, and the honest reason is that we could not read them: Disney+ renders its help pages with JavaScript, Amazon disallows its help paths to crawlers and the BBC blocked us outright. All three do publish requirements. We would rather say so than fill the gap from a secondary source, which is how most of the figures on the internet got there.

One household, one evening, added up

Direct answer: A 4K film, a Full HD stream, a 1080p video call and a console game online, all at the same time, on the services' own figures: 24.5 Mbps.

That is the whole arithmetic, and it is worth doing slowly because it is the part every speed table skips. Netflix wants 15 Mbps or higher for the film. YouTube wants 5 Mbps for whoever is watching something else in Full HD. Zoom asks “3.8Mbps/3.0Mbps (up/down)” for the call, so three down and a little under four up. Nintendo says “many services operate best with a download speed of 1.5Mbps or higher - the higher the better”. Add them and the household is asking for about twenty five megabits a second while doing four things at once.

Push it harder. Make both films 4K and add a second call and you are at about 45 Mbps. Put a 4K cloud gaming session on top, which NVIDIA puts at “45 Mbps for 4K resolutions at 120 FPS (e.g. 3840x2160)” and which is the largest published requirement found anywhere in this research, and you are at 90. That is a deliberately unreasonable evening, and it still fits inside a 100 Mbps package.

So the honest headline is this: a full evening of streaming, calling and gaming at once comes to well under 40 Mbps on the services' own published figures. The section on headroom below explains why you should still not buy exactly that number, and the one after it explains what to buy instead.

Video calls, and the 4K call that does not exist

Direct answer: Every platform tops out at 1080p and the largest figure any of them publishes for a call is Microsoft's “1080p requires about 4 Mbps per stream”. The 4K calling row in every speed table describes a product you cannot buy.

Zoom publishes “3.8Mbps/3.0Mbps (up/down)” for a 1080p call, one to one and group alike, and “1.2Mbps (up/down)” at 720p. Microsoft recommends 1,500/1,500 kilobits each way for a one to one Teams call and says on its own 1080p page that “1080p requires about 4 Mbps per stream”. Google Meet publishes “Up to 3.6 Mbps” per participant for 1080p and “Up to 1.7 Mbps” at 720p, and those figures live in the Workspace administrator guide: Meet's consumer requirements page publishes no numbers at all.

We went looking for a 4K figure and there is not one

Five platforms were checked for it: Zoom's three system requirement pages, Microsoft's bandwidth page, Microsoft's dedicated 1080p page, Google's Meet network page and Cisco's Webex bandwidth page. The words 4K and 2160p appear on none of them. Apple's current iPhone specification says “FaceTime HD (1080p) video calling over 5G or Wi-Fi”. Microsoft's own administrative setting for the resolution cap is literally named Max1080p. In short, no consumer video calling service publishes a 4K requirement, because none of them offers a 4K call.

The direction nobody mentions

Look again at Zoom's figure and read the order: “3.8Mbps/3.0Mbps (up/down)”. Zoom asks for MORE upload than download, because your own camera has to leave the house. On a UK copper line the upload half is typically a tenth of the download half, which is why calls break up on connections whose download speed looks fine. Our guide to upload versus download speed sets out what each UK provider publishes for upload and why those figures do not compare with each other.

Gaming, where the number is not the number

Direct answer: Nintendo asks for 1.5 Mbps and is the only console maker that publishes a figure at all. Cloud gaming is a different product and needs ten to thirty times as much.

Of every claim on the page this replaces, the gaming one was the furthest from any source. It said online gaming needs 3 to 6 Mbps. We could not find that range, or anything like it, published by a single games company.

Playing online: one published figure in the whole category

Nintendo says “many services operate best with a download speed of 1.5Mbps or higher - the higher the better”. That is the only throughput figure any console maker publishes for ordinary online play, and it is below the bottom of the range this page used to give. Activision goes further and contradicts the premise outright: “Most online games do not require a great amount of bandwidth, even when you are hosting a match.” Riot Games publishes no figure of any kind.

What publishers do put a number on

Not speed. Epic Games quantifies packet loss instead. It states “Packet loss should be 0%.” It gives a threshold too: “Anything consistently above about 1% will cause problems in game, even if your average ping is staying within the range of a few ms.” Those are published numbers, and a download figure for online play mostly is not. Our guide to latency, jitter and packet loss covers the metrics that actually decide whether a game feels right.

Cloud gaming is the exception, and it is a different thing

When the game runs in a data centre and the picture is streamed to you, the requirement looks like video rather than like gaming. Microsoft asks for “20Mbps down” for Xbox Cloud Gaming. NVIDIA asks for “15 Mbps for HD resolutions at up to 60 FPS (e.g. 1280x720)”, “25 Mbps for FHD resolutions at 60 FPS (e.g. 1920x1080)” and “45 Mbps for 4K resolutions at 120 FPS (e.g. 3840x2160)”, and adds a condition that matters more than any of them: “We also require less than 80ms of network latency from an NVIDIA data center.” Sony says “the minimum required connection speed for Remote Play is 5Mbps for both upload and download”, which is symmetric and therefore harder on a copper line than the number suggests.

And then there is Valve, which makes one of the most demanding streaming products on the list and publishes no figure for it at all. Its advice is “you should start at the lowest setting and start slowly increasing the bandwidth until you see problems”. For a product this sensitive to the room it runs in, that is more useful than a number would be.

Why you still want headroom

Direct answer: Because the published figures are what each service needs when nothing else is going wrong, and something usually is. Two to three times your measured peak is sensible. Twelve times is not.

This page argues that households are sold far more speed than they use. It would be a poor argument if it pretended the published figures were the whole story, so here is the other half honestly.

Wi-Fi is not your broadband speed

Every figure on this page is what has to arrive at your router. What reaches the device at the far end of the house, through two walls and a floor, is usually a good deal less. Headroom on the line is one way of absorbing that, although moving the router is a cheaper one. Our free broadband speed test measures what is arriving, which is the only way to know whether a slow evening is the line or the Wi-Fi.

Things burst

A stream does not draw a steady 15 Mbps. It buffers ahead in bursts, a game patches itself in the background, a phone decides it is time to back up ten thousand photos. A line sized exactly to the sum of the steady figures will feel slower than one with room above it, even though the arithmetic says otherwise. If it is only slow at certain hours, our guide to broadband slowing down in the evening covers why.

Simultaneous 4K is the real multiplier

The one case where a household genuinely needs a large number is several people wanting 4K at the same time. On Netflix's figure two 4K streams is 30 Mbps before anything else happens, and three is 45. If that is your house, buy for it. If it is not, the arithmetic above is closer to your evening than any table is.

What to actually buy

Direct answer: Add up your own evening, double it, then choose on price, contract length and upload rather than on the headline download figure.

Step one: add up your own evening, not a typical one

Count what genuinely happens at the same time in your house on a busy night. A 4K stream is 15 Mbps, a Full HD stream is 5, a 1080p video call is 3 to 4, online console play is about 1.5 and music is a third of one. Most households land between 15 and 40 Mbps. Our free broadband speed calculator does the sum from what your household actually does, in under a minute.

Step two: double it, and stop there

Two to three times your peak is the sensible allowance for Wi-Fi, bursts and a household that grows. For most of the country that lands on a package somewhere between 60 and 150 Mbps, which is the middle of almost every provider's range rather than the top of it.

Step three: choose on the three things that actually differ

Once two packages both clear your number, download speed has stopped telling you anything. What is left is the total price across the whole contract including any mid-contract rise, the length of the commitment, and the upload figure, which varies far more between packages than download does and is the half that decides whether your calls hold up. If you are already paying for a speed you do not get, our guide to whether poor speeds let you leave a contract covers what the rules allow.

What this page used to say

Direct answer: Three corrections, and the first one had us quoting a speed for a product that nobody sells.

The previous version of this page carried a table of figures with no sources. Checking each row against the service it described is what produced this rebuild, and three rows did not survive it.

Two smaller things went with them. The page described a YouFibre package as 7 Gbps, which YouFibre does not sell: 7000 Mbps is the published average speed of its You 8000 product. And it suggested ADSL was adequate for a single person, which in 2026 steers a reader at a product being withdrawn.

In short

1. Netflix publishes “15 Mbps or higher” for 4K and “5 Mbps or higher” for 1080p.
2. YouTube publishes the same 5 Mbps for 1080p, which is the strongest corroboration on the page.
3. Zoom asks for “3.8Mbps/3.0Mbps (up/down)” for a 1080p call, so the upload half is the larger of the two.
4. On five platforms checked, no consumer video calling service publishes a 4K requirement, because none of them offers a 4K call.
5. Nintendo is the only console maker publishing a figure for ordinary online play, and it is 1.5 Mbps.
6. Activision says plainly that “Most online games do not require a great amount of bandwidth, even when you are hosting a match.”
7. A busy household evening adds up to under 40 Mbps on the services’ own figures, which is a fraction of the tier most of them are sold.

Each line stands on its own and carries its date. Reviewed by a person at least quarterly, last on 12 October 2026.