What internet speed do you need to work from home?

What the video platforms actually publish

These are the vendors’ own figures for their own software, read on the last-checked date in the source panel below. They are stated per endpoint and per application — one person, one call — not per household.

Two things fall out of that table. First, a single call is a low-single-digit Mbps problem on every platform — Microsoft goes further and says Teams “can deliver HD video quality in under 1.5 Mbps”. Second, the platforms degrade rather than fail: Microsoft states that when bandwidth is insufficient, “Teams prioritizes audio quality over video quality”, and Google says that if your network lacks the bandwidth, “Meet lowers the video definition”.

The one household-scale number, and what it really is

The FCC’s fixed broadband benchmark is 100/20 Mbps — “a download speed of at least 100 Mbps and an upload speed of at least 20 Mbps”. The Commission raised it from 25/3 Mbps in the 2024 Section 706 Report and kept it in the 2026 report, which says plainly: “We maintain 100/20 Mbps as our benchmark in defining advanced telecommunications capability for fixed broadband.”

It is worth being precise about what that is. It is the threshold the Commission uses to count how many Americans have advanced telecommunications capability, and the line the BEAD grant program draws between an underserved location and an adequately served one — below 25/3 Mbps, a location counts as unserved outright. It is not a per-household recommendation. Asked in 2024 to build one — a consumer “speed index” measuring the online activities of American households — the Commission declined, saying it “lacks sufficient data to conduct this type of comprehensive examination and calculation.” Treat 100/20 as a floor the country is being measured against, not as an answer to your question.

Turning per-call figures into a household number

Google publishes the only sizing method any of the three vendors gives, and it is simple arithmetic: “To calculate the minimum bandwidth needed for your organization, multiply the average bandwidth per participant by the peak number of concurrent participants.” That works just as well for a house as for an office. Count what runs at the same time in your worst hour, take each one’s published figure, and add them up.

Why upload is the number that bites

Your camera, your screen share, your cloud backups and your large file uploads all use the upload path, and upload is where the access technologies diverge most. In the FCC’s Thirteenth Measuring Broadband America report, the weighted mean advertised upload speed across the measured providers was 528 Mbps for fiber, 16.6 Mbps for cable and 9.5 Mbps for DSL, and the report concludes that “fiber service tiers generally are symmetric in their actual upload and download speeds”, because fiber “can be engineered to have symmetric upload and download speeds” while lower-capacity technologies cannot.

Cable’s average in that measurement sits below the FCC’s own 20 Mbps upload benchmark. That is the whole reason a video call can stutter on a plan sold on its download headline, and the reason fiber is the strongest remote-work option where you can order it. 5G home internet and fixed wireless can work well but vary with congestion at your address.

The third number: latency

Mbps describes how much fits down the pipe. It says nothing about whether packets arrive on time and intact, which is what a live call depends on — a line can test at 500 Mbps and still fail a call. If your speed test looks fine while calls break anyway, the cause is latency, jitter and packet loss — the numbers Mbps hides, and that guide has the measured thresholds.

If you already have service and these numbers look wrong, settle whether the problem is your Wi-Fi or the line itself before you shop for a bigger plan — a faster tier cannot fix a radio fault.

Before you choose a plan

1. Check which types are available at your exact address.
2. Compare upload speeds and any data limits, not just the download headline.
3. Add up what runs in your worst hour, using the published per-application figures above.
4. Confirm the price after any promo period and the equipment fees.
5. If your income depends on being online, price a backup — a 5G hotspot on a different network is the usual failover.

Already on a plan that under-delivers? The tier name is not what the provider committed to — see how to prove you are not getting the speed you pay for.