Guides / Money
Before you upgrade your internet plan, read this
5 min read
The WiFi is slow, so you call the provider and buy a faster plan. Nothing improves. This happens constantly, because the bottleneck was never the plan.
Two different problems that feel identical
Your internet plan is the pipe from the street to your building. It's what you pay for monthly.
Your WiFi is how that connection gets distributed inside. It's determined by your equipment, its placement, and your walls.
Upgrading the first does nothing for the second. If 800 Mbps arrives at your router and the back bedroom only receives 15, buying 1,200 Mbps means 1,200 arrives at the router and the back bedroom still gets 15.
The five-minute test
Run a speed test standing right next to your router. Then run the same test in the room where things are slow.
Fast at the router, slow in the room — you have a WiFi problem. A faster plan will not help. Better coverage will.
Slow in both places — that's the plan or the provider. An upgrade might genuinely help.
Fast in both, but things still stutter — likely congestion or interference rather than raw speed. Check how many neighbouring networks share your channel.
For the test to mean anything, use a wired connection or stand within a few feet of the router. Testing over WiFi from across the house measures your WiFi, not your internet.
How much speed do you actually need?
Less than most people are sold. Rough figures per simultaneous activity:
- Video calls: 3–5 Mbps each. A household with three people on calls needs perhaps 15 Mbps of the pipe.
- 4K streaming: around 25 Mbps per stream.
- HD streaming: around 5 Mbps per stream.
- Gaming: very little bandwidth — under 5 Mbps. Latency matters, not speed.
- Web and email: negligible.
A busy family — two 4K streams, three video calls, a gaming console and general browsing — fits comfortably in 100 Mbps. Most households on 500 Mbps or 1 Gbps plans never come close to using them.
What matters more than the headline number
Upload speed. Cable plans are often lopsided: 500 Mbps down, 20 up. Video calls, cloud backups and sending large files all depend on upload. If your calls look fine to you but you appear frozen to everyone else, upload is your constraint. This is the number to check if you work from home, and it's the strongest argument for fibre over cable.
Latency. How long a packet takes to make the round trip. Gaming and video calls care about this far more than raw speed.
Consistency. A connection that delivers 200 Mbps reliably beats one that peaks at 900 and collapses every evening.
When upgrading is genuinely right
- Your speed test is slow right next to the router, wired.
- Your upload is under 20 Mbps and you work from home.
- You have fibre available and you're on old cable — often better upload and latency at a similar price.
- Your current plan is genuinely saturated at peak times, which you can confirm from your router's usage graphs.
The cheaper move first
Before spending more every month forever, spend an hour measuring. Walk the house with a free signal app, write the readings down, run speed tests at the best and worst spots.
If the numbers show good speed at the router and poor coverage elsewhere, the fix is one-time equipment rather than a permanently higher bill — and it usually costs less over two years than the upgrade would.