Speed test Guides
The speed you measure depends first on the technology that links your home to the internet. Each one has its strengths, limits and pitfalls: here is how to tell them apart.
| Technology | Medium | Typical download | Upload | Typical latency |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fibre to the home (FTTH) | Optical fibre | 300 Mbps to 8 Gbps | Often symmetrical or high | 2 to 10 ms |
| Cable (DOCSIS 3.1) | Cable TV network | 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps | Much lower | 10 to 25 ms |
| VDSL2 | Copper phone line | 15 to 100 Mbps | 5 to 40 Mbps | 10 to 25 ms |
| ADSL2+ | Copper phone line | 1 to 20 Mbps | under 1 Mbps | 25 to 50 ms |
| 4G home internet | Mobile network | 10 to 100 Mbps | 5 to 50 Mbps | 30 to 60 ms |
| 5G home internet | Mobile network | 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps | 20 to 100 Mbps | 15 to 40 ms |
| Geostationary satellite | Satellite at 36,000 km | 20 to 100 Mbps | 3 to 10 Mbps | 550 to 700 ms |
| Low-orbit satellite | Constellation at ~550 km | 50 to 250 Mbps | 10 to 30 Mbps | 25 to 60 ms |
These ranges are indicative: they vary by provider and country, and for copper and mobile, by your exact situation.
Fibre carries light all the way to your home. Speed hardly depends on distance, latency is the lowest, and the connection copes well with many simultaneous uses. Watch the wording: some "fibre" plans stop at the building or the street cabinet and finish over coaxial cable or copper (FTTB, FTTC), in which case you get the performance of that last stretch.
With fast fibre, the bottleneck often moves inside your home: Wi-Fi, a network card limited to 1 Gbps, an old Category 5 Ethernet cable.
ADSL and VDSL reuse the phone line. Their speed drops with the length of the line to the exchange or street cabinet: within a few hundred metres, VDSL exceeds 50 Mbps; beyond one or two kilometres, it falls back to ADSL levels. Upload stays low, which hampers sending files and video calls. In many countries the copper network is gradually being switched off in favour of fibre.
Cable networks, originally built for television, now reach gigabit download speeds. Their weak points are the more limited upload and the fact that bandwidth is shared between subscribers in the same area, which can reduce performance at peak times.
A 4G or 5G router receives the internet over the mobile network, like a smartphone. It is quick to set up where fibre doesn't reach. Performance depends on coverage, distance to the mast and how many people use the same cell, so speed can vary a lot by time of day. Placing the router near a window facing the mast often makes all the difference. Some 4G or 5G home plans include a data cap or slow you down beyond a threshold: read the terms.
Satellite covers the most remote areas. Geostationary satellites, 36,000 km up, impose latency of around 600 ms that makes online gaming and video calls painful. Low-orbit constellations, a few hundred kilometres up, offer latency close to ground connections, at the cost of dedicated equipment and an often higher subscription.
Once connected, measure your connection regularly, over Ethernet and at different times: it's the best way to check you're getting what you pay for.
For most households, no: 300 to 500 Mbps easily covers several 4K streams, video calls and downloads. Very high speeds mainly help with large file transfers, and only if your equipment can use them.
Where 5G coverage is good, speeds can be comparable, but stability and latency remain less consistent than fibre, especially at busy times. It is an excellent alternative where fibre isn't available.
ADSL speed depends mostly on the length of the phone line to the exchange: beyond a few kilometres it drops sharply. Poor internal wiring or a bad phone socket can also degrade the signal.