Basics
What broadband means and what Mbps actually buy you
Megabits and megabytes are not the same thing. Here is the difference, and why your download runs 'slower' than the plan you paid for.
5 min read · updated August 2026
The definition changed, and it matters
In March 2024 the FCC raised the national broadband benchmark to 100 Mbps down and 20 Mbps up. Anything below that is not broadband by the federal definition, whatever the marketing says. The old standard was 25/3, set in 2015, and plenty of plans still sold today sit under the new line.
This is not academic. The benchmark is what federal subsidy programs and coverage maps are measured against.
Megabits are not megabytes
This is the single most common source of confusion about internet speed, and it is a factor of eight.
- Mbps = megabits per second. This is what plans are sold in.
- MB/s = megabytes per second. This is what your browser's download bar shows.
8 bits = 1 byte. So divide by eight:
| Plan speed | Real download rate | 5 GB game download |
|---|---|---|
| 100 Mbps | 12.5 MB/s | ~7 minutes |
| 300 Mbps | 37.5 MB/s | ~2.5 minutes |
| 1,000 Mbps | 125 MB/s | ~45 seconds |
Your 1 Gig plan showing "118 MB/s" in Steam is not broken. That is 1 Gig.
How much speed a household actually needs
Streaming is far less demanding than people assume:
- Netflix HD: 5 Mbps
- Netflix 4K: 15 Mbps
- Zoom HD call: 3 Mbps up and down
- Competitive gaming: 3–6 Mbps (latency matters, bandwidth does not)
- 4K security camera uploading continuously: 8 Mbps up
Add it up for a busy evening in a family of four: two 4K streams, a video call and a game is roughly 40 Mbps down and 10 Mbps up. That fits inside a 100 Mbps plan with room to spare.
So why buy more? Three honest reasons:
- Upload. If you work from home, back up to the cloud, or upload video, upload is the constraint, and the only way to buy more of it is usually to buy a bigger plan.
- Headroom on a shared medium. Cable slows at peak hours. A 500 Mbps plan that sags to 200 at 9pm still covers you.
- Devices, not people. A modern house has thirty things on WiFi. Each one is small; together they are not.
Why your speed test never matches the plan
Advertised speeds are "up to" figures measured to the provider's own equipment. Between that number and your laptop sit several things that will take a cut:
- WiFi. This is almost always the real bottleneck. A 1 Gig plan over a five-year-old router two rooms away delivers 200 Mbps, and the plan is not the problem.
- The device. Old phones and laptops have WiFi radios that top out well below gigabit.
- The test server. Test to a nearby server or the result measures the internet, not your line.
- Everyone else in the house. Run the test when nothing else is streaming.
Test over an Ethernet cable plugged straight into the router before you conclude anything about your plan. If Ethernet gives you the speed and WiFi does not, you have a WiFi problem, and no upgrade will fix it.