Is 10 Mbps fast enough to work from home
With the changing job-market landscape, more people and organizations are embracing working from home.
Initially, working from home was a practice of freelancers and entrepreneurs that wanted to save on office space. However, with the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic, most organizations had no choice but to have their employees work from home to flatten the curve. To keep communication seamless, organizations turned to video apps like Zoom, Skype, Google Meets, etc. Besides work stuff, all these activities require not only internet access but one that is stable and reliable. Now, is 10 Mbps fast enough to work from home?
10 Mbps is fast enough to work from home per person since it has a download speed of approximately 10 Mbps and upload speed of 1 Mbps which is sufficient for most activities. This however depends on the type of activities that you’ll be undertaking.
You’re now working from home which has increased your internet speed demands since you aren’t only working but also doing other activities at home like streaming a movie on Netflix. Besides, you have to keep abreast with your colleagues, send emails, and even download files. To get a better understanding of how much bandwidth you need, let’s break down what activities you might have to carry out.
Table of Contents
Email & Chats
An email is an essential tool in the workplace due to its formalness. You’ll definitely need to check your email and send others to either clients or colleagues. You don’t have to worry about the basic email text conversations as they don’t use much. However, sometimes you may need to attach documents, photos, and even videos in the email. Some might be large while most of them will be small. Emails and chats like Slack go hand-in-hand for enhanced productivity since no one likes being bombarded with email threads. These two activities can run on an internet speed of 1 Mbps.
Video conferencing
This is what keeps working from home alive because you still get to interact with your colleagues and hold meetings as you would in the office. It’s also ideal for keeping in touch with family and friends. Having an out-of-sync video call is not only frustrating but also distorts the intended message. On average, video conferencing per person requires 1 to 4 Mbps and a 10 Mbps internet service should be fast enough for all video conferencing apps regardless of the number of people on the call or if you intend on recording the call.
Web browsing
You’ll probably have to keep browsing the internet either for information, news, or on social media. This won’t take much bandwidth unless the sites you visit contain lots of uncompressed images and videos. An average web page consumes about 2 MB of data which means that with an internet service with download speeds of about 16 Mbps, the page should load within a second which isn’t far from a 10 Mbps download speed that a 10 Mbps/s internet service has. For heavy browsing, an internet plan with a 5 Mbps download speed is enough. This is ideal for social media browsing, especially sites with autoplay.
Sharing of large files
Some jobs will require friends sharing of large files such as media files (photos and videos) with a single file ranging from 5 MB in size to even 10 GB for the whole folder. An internet speed of 10 Mbps should be fast enough for files will smaller sizes while bigger files might take longer than expected.
Activity |
Email & chat |
Video conferencing |
Web browsing |
Minimum internet speed |
1 – 4 Mbps |
1- 4 Mbps |
1 – 5 Mbps |
Note that all these figures are for per person and when only working on a single device. If you have multiple devices or there are other people in the house like kids streaming content or gaming, then your speeds will decrease.
FAQs
How can I check my internet speed?
You can check your internet by running an internet test. There are several internet speed services online including Fast.com, speedtest.net, and many more. Simply open a browser on your device to visit one of them.
What is the difference between download and upload speeds?
Download speed is to how fast you can download a piece of information like an email attachment from the internet while upload speed refers to how fast you can upload content to the network.