The right internet speed is the one that keeps up with your habits without you ever thinking about it. A little headroom brings comfort on the busiest evening; far more than you need changes very little in daily life. Here are simple benchmarks to place your household — and if you'd rather have the figure straight away, our speed calculator gives it to you in thirty seconds.
A speed in megabits per second (Mbps) isn't a stock that runs out: it's a flow capacity shared by every device at once. What matters, then, isn't what you consume over a day but what travels through the line simultaneously at the busiest moment — usually a weekday evening around eight.
Two figures describe any line: the download (what comes in — video, pages, updates) and the upload (what goes out — your picture in a video call, photos to the cloud, a file you share). They are rarely equal, and the second one is easily overlooked even though it's in play every day.
These are the values we use in our own speed calculator. They're generous enough to keep everything smooth:
The method is simple: add up what genuinely overlaps at your busiest moment, then add roughly 30 % of headroom. A household running one 4K screen, a video call, some browsing and three connected devices lands around 50 Mbps — comfortable, and not at all exceptional.
None of the three quite fits? Enter your own habits in the speed calculator: it adds up your usage, applies the headroom and points straight to the matching technology.
As soon as you work from home, the upload counts as much as the download: your picture in a meeting, a folder heading to the cloud, a backup running overnight. Fibre stands out here, with an upload close to its download — our fibre guide explains what that changes in practice.
Latency, the reaction time of the line, governs everything that happens live: gaming, video meetings, a connected camera. Low latency makes a connection feel instant even at a modest speed. A good line is therefore a balance between three numbers, not one big one.
Between your subscription and your screen sits your Wi-Fi, and that's often where the biggest gains are. Three simple habits go a long way: place the modem centrally and in the open rather than inside a cupboard, use the 5 GHz band for devices that stay nearby, and connect anything stationary — television, games console, desktop — with a cable.
To know what your line really delivers, measure with a cable plugged into the modem: that's your subscription's figure. The gap with a phone measurement at the far end of the garden shows what Wi-Fi has to give — often without spending a single euro.
Once you know your benchmark, the next two steps are very concrete. Our comparison tool ranks offers by real cost over twelve months at the speed you chose. And because availability in Belgium varies street by street, an advisor confirms which technologies genuinely reach your address.
Moving house soon? That's the ideal moment to do both at once — our moving guide sets out the order. Otherwise, one look at the speed calculator is enough to tell whether your current plan still fits your household.
An advisor turns your usage into Mbps, checks what is available at your place and compares the entire Belgian market. Free of charge.
🛒 Order onlineor everything in writing via assistant@speed.be
