Free tool
Internet Plan Comparison
Work out the download and upload speed your office genuinely needs, which connection type fits, and whether a backup line is worth paying for.
Work out the speed your office actually needs rather than the speed you are being sold. Upload matters far more than most plans advertise, and it is usually the reason video calls break up while the download test looks perfect.
What the speed is made of
| Demand | Download | Upload | Note |
|---|
Connection types that fit
Why upload is the number that matters
Almost every plan is advertised on its download figure because that is the impressive one. The work that actually breaks when a line is undersized goes the other way: your camera feed in a video call, the file you are sending a client, the backup running to the cloud, the footage leaving your recorder, and anyone connecting in from home. A line advertised as very fast with a small upload will feel broken during a meeting and perfect in a speed test ten minutes later.
This is also why the fault is so often blamed on the wrong thing. People replace access points and routers chasing a problem that lives entirely in the upload direction of the line outside the building.
Contention, which nobody prints on the box
Shared connections are sold on the assumption that not everyone uses them at once. That assumption holds for a household and breaks for an office, where the busy period is the same hour for everybody. The estimate here already accounts for simultaneous use rather than adding up every theoretical need, which is why it does not simply multiply the number of people by a speed.
If the line is shared with other tenants in the building, ask what the contention ratio is. A dedicated or business line costs more and is sold on a guarantee rather than a maximum, and that difference is the entire point of paying for it.
When a second line earns its cost
A backup connection looks like a luxury until the first full day without internet. The test is arithmetic: if a day of downtime costs more than a year of the cheapest second line, the second line is already cheaper. It should be a different technology and ideally a different provider, because a fiber cut or a provider outage takes down both lines if they share either. A router that can fail over automatically turns that second line from a manual scramble into something nobody in the office notices.