While working and learning from home, maintaining a fast and reliable internet connection is important. The speed of your internet connection varies and is based on where you're accessing the internet. For example, while accessing the internet on campus, you'll achieve high speeds and realiable service. If you're accessing the internet from home, speed depends upon purchased packages through your Internet Service Provider (ISP) such as Frontier or Spectrum. You can test your internet speed by following the steps below.
Instructions
- On your computer or mobile device, use your preferred web browser, such FireFox or Chrome and search for "speed test" in the search bar. You should get a top result for an immediate speed test. You could also go directly to speedtest.net as an alternative. At the time of this writing, you could expect the following results for Google and Bing.
- Click the "Run Speed Test" or "Start" buttons to begin your test.
- Review your results.
What's a Good Internet Speed?
Most high speed home Internet plans provide around 7 to 50 mbps speeds for uploads and downloads, but you'll need to check your individual plan. There will always be some variability in your test results, as the data each test uses and the network conditions on the Internet during your tests, are always fluctuating. Time of day is a factor as well, as you'll likely see higher speeds when fewer people will be streaming.
To know if your internet speed is adequate, consider the minimum speeds for these common campus services:
- Zoom
- 2.0 Mbps up and down for single screen
- 2.0 Mbps up 4.0 Mbps down for dual screen
- 2.0 Mbps up 6.0 Mbps down for triple screen
- For screen sharing only: 150-300kbps
- For audio VoIP: 60-80kbps
- Microsoft Teams
- 30 kbps for Peer-to-peer audio calling
- 130 kbps for Peer-to-peer audio calling and screen sharing
- 500 kbps for Peer-to-peer quality video calling 360p at 30fps
- 1.2 Mbps for Peer-to-peer HD quality video calling with resolution of HD 720p at 30fps
- 1.5 Mbps for Peer-to-peer HD quality video calling with resolution of HD 1080p at 30fps
- 500 kbps/1Mbps for Group Video calling
- 1 Mbps/2Mbps for HD Group video calling (540p videos on 1080p screen)
Considerations
For most faster and more reliable internet connectivity from home, please consider the following:
- If you can connect your computer to your internet router with an ethernet cable, this will provide you the most reliable internet access and speed. It bypasses any other devices that may also be connected to the internet (i.e., mobile devices, TVs, etc.).
- If you are using a wireless device connected to home WiFi, consider other devices that are sharing your network. Items from personal home assistants, and smart devices such as televisions and even modern kitchen appliances. Disconnecting these devices as much as possilble, will ensure your device connected through WiFi will not compete with other devices for available internet speeds.