What speed
you really need

For a home with one or two people, 300 Mbps symmetric comfortably covers streaming, video calls and remote working, even with several devices connected at once. Beyond that, download speed barely matters: a 4K film fits into a much smaller margin, so going from 300 to 600 Mbps or 1 Gbps is rarely noticeable in the everyday use of an ordinary home. What is worth checking is the upload, because that's where video calls and cloud backups show up, and many home tariffs cut it back considerably compared with the advertised download. And there's an important caveat: if the Wi-Fi doesn't reach the rooms properly, paying for more speed solves nothing, because the problem lies in how it's distributed inside the home, not in what comes down the line. Before upgrading your tariff, it's worth checking whether the problem is the contract or the indoor coverage.

You size it by upload, not download, and it depends on how many people are uploading something at the same time, not on the size of the premises. A shop with a card terminal, customer Wi-Fi and a couple of cloud cameras needs more upload than a five-person office that only browses and checks email, even if the office seems “more professional”. As an order of magnitude, a shop with a card terminal and customer Wi-Fi usually needs around 100 Mbps upload, an office of five to ten desks with cloud backups is around 300 Mbps symmetric, and from fifteen desks with cameras and simultaneous backups you want a symmetric line that copes well at peak times. What matters is adding up what happens at the same time at the worst moment of the day, not at a quiet moment, because that's where an undersized line really shows.

The same figure for download and upload, instead of a big download and a much smaller upload. On fibre that's usually standard; on 5G and fixed wireless, almost never, because those technologies allocate less capacity to upload than to download. The figure shown large in the advertising is always the download, so a “600 Mbps” 5G line can have an upload well below the 30 Mbps of a more modest symmetric fibre line. For normal home use, streaming and browsing, the asymmetry is barely noticeable. But as soon as video calls, cloud backups or cameras come in, upload becomes the figure that matters, and symmetry stops being a technical detail and becomes what decides whether day-to-day work runs smoothly or keeps breaking up.

Because each HD video call takes about 3 Mbps of upload per person, and that figure has nothing to do with the 600 Mbps the tariff advertises: that's download. If the contract includes, say, 30 Mbps upload, and two or three people are on different calls at once with a cloud backup running in the background, those 30 Mbps run out straight away and Zoom starts freezing or dropping audio. The 600 Mbps download is always more than enough: it's for downloading pages and videos, not for sustaining a video call, which is a connection that uploads data continuously. That's why a line that sounds generous in the advert can fall short in an office with several meetings at once, and the solution isn't more download but more upload, or better scheduling of when backups run.

No. The extra speed you pay for reaches the router, and from there on it's the indoor setup that counts: walls, distance and the channel your neighbours' networks use weigh far more than the contracted speed. If you connect a laptop to the router by cable and get the contracted speed, but the phone struggles in one room, the problem isn't the line but the Wi-Fi in that area, and going from 300 Mbps to 1 Gbps changes nothing because the bottleneck is no longer the data coming in but how it's spread through the air. Paying for more speed in that case is spending money in the wrong place. What fixes the Wi-Fi in the bedrooms is checking where the router sits, whether you need an extra access point and what obstacles are in between — not the tariff.

A 1080p camera recording continuously to the cloud takes between 2 and 4 Mbps of upload constantly, around the clock, not just when it detects motion. With three cameras like that, you're permanently using the equivalent of a group video call that never hangs up, and that upload competes all day with work video calls and cloud backups. That's why, in fixed installations with several cameras, recording to your own on-site recorder and only going to the cloud when you need to check something is usually a better idea than sending the video out continuously: it frees that upload for everything else, and recording doesn't depend on the line always being available. Sending everything to the cloud is more convenient at first, but you pay for it in bandwidth every month.

No. A static IP doesn't give you any speed or improve it in any way: it gives you an internet address that doesn't change over time, and that's only useful when you need to reach something specific from outside, such as cameras, a server or a CCTV system, without relying on an intermediate service. They're two completely different things that are sometimes sold together, and that causes confusion: a static IP on a slow line is still a slow line, and a fast line without a static IP is still fast for everything except access from outside. If it's offered to you as a speed upgrade, that's not what it is, and it's worth asking explicitly what you'd use it for before paying, because if you're not going to access anything from outside the network, you probably don't need it.

With a speed test done over cable, with the laptop plugged straight into the router, not over Wi-Fi, and repeated at a normal time of day and at a peak time, such as mid-morning or early afternoon. A test done from your phone on the sofa mainly measures the Wi-Fi in that part of the house, not what's actually coming down the line, so it can give a far lower figure than the contracted one without anything being wrong with the line. If you get the speed you pay for over cable, both download and upload, the problem isn't the provider but how the Wi-Fi is distributed. If you don't reach the contracted speed even over cable, then you do need to complain, because the indoor setup can't make up for a line that's already arriving in poor shape.