Most businesses either buy too much internet speed and pay for headroom they'll never use, or buy too little and spend a year wondering why everything feels slow. Both mistakes come from the same root problem: nobody actually sat down and did the math.
Here's a straightforward way to get it right.
Start with what's actually using your connection
Speed needs come from three places: how many people are online at once, what they're doing, and what's running in the background whether anyone notices or not.
- Everyday use — email, web browsing, cloud file access. Light, but it adds up across a full staff.
- Heavy applications — video calls, VoIP phones, cloud-hosted software (POS systems, EHR platforms, CRMs), large file transfers.
- Background load — security cameras, backups, software updates, guest WiFi. Often invisible until it collides with something important.
A rough baseline by headcount
This isn't a substitute for a real assessment, but it's a sane starting point for a general office environment:
- 1–10 employees: 100–300 Mbps down / enough upload to support video calls without strain (25–50 Mbps up)
- 10–50 employees: 300–500 Mbps, symmetrical if the budget allows, especially if cloud software is central to the job
- 50–200 employees: 500 Mbps–1 Gbps, usually with a case for dedicated (not shared) bandwidth
- 200+ employees or multi-site: Custom design — this is where a real needs assessment stops being optional
Upload speed is the number people forget
Most business connections are sold on the download number because it's the bigger, more impressive figure. But video calls, VoIP phones, and cloud backups all depend on upload speed — and a lot of cheaper business plans have upload speeds a fraction of their download. If your team is on video calls all day and things keep freezing on your end, this is usually why.
The honest test
Forget the marketing numbers for a second. The real question is: does your team ever notice the internet? Slow video calls, laggy cloud software, or a POS system that hangs during checkout are the actual signals — not whether you're technically "under" some speed tier.
Where this goes wrong
The most common overpay: a business gets sold on a 1 Gbps circuit because it sounds impressive, when their actual usage pattern would run comfortably on a third of that. The most common underbuy: a growing team stays on a legacy plan sized for headcount from two years ago, and everyone just assumes internet is "supposed to" feel a little sluggish.
Not sure which side of that you're on?
Get a real assessment