Bandwidth calculator

Bandwidth Calculation made easy

It is not easy to know how much bandwidth you will actually need. A lot ora little mean different things to different people and just guessing will most likely end you up with not enough bandwidth or too much and not using it, but paying for it nevertheless.

The tool below will allow you to see what the minimum bandwidth requirement is that you would need to perform several activities simultaneously.

Social Media

Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are some of the largest social networks in the world. They are a fantastic way of keeping in touch with friends and family, sharing pictures and videos, and discovering news. However, as the networks have grown and the apps have become advanced, they are using up more data than ever on your phone.

As a rule, you should expect to see these social media sites use 1.5MB of data per minute if you’re simply scrolling through and reading posts. Once you begin interacting, watching video content or messaging friends, this can increase to 2.6MB per minute. This means that if you spend an hour or more on social media each day, you could use up 2.7GB of data per month.

Streaming

You will be surprised at how quickly streaming sites such as Netflix and Amazon can eat into your data. How much depends on the video quality. Ff you watch a 480p or 720p resolution video when on mobile data, you are using anywhere between 800MBs and 1.3GBs per hour. Moving this up to 1080p, 1440p and even 4K viewing, the amount of data rises to 1.9GB and above every hour.

When using music streaming platforms, such as Spotify or Apple Music, data can also be used up very quickly. While some services offer super-HQ streaming music, most use the same scale: Low, Normal and High. For low quality, this roughly translates at 43MB per hour, for normal it’s 72MB per hour and for high it’s 115 MB. These are all averages and so are subject to slight changes dependent on your individual usage.

Real-time vs Non-real-time

Not all internet traffic is real time. Email and large files, while they can be urgent, do not depend on how fast they are delivered. Whether fast or slow the entire file or message will not be affected.

For Real time applications like phone calls, video and music streaming this is however very important. Insufficient bandwidth on real time applications will lead to choppy phone calls, buffering, pixellated or blurry low quality video and interrupted audio. All being a very unpleasant experience.

Real Time

real-time traffic needs a minimum amount of bandwidth to function properly. If the minimum is not met then the sound or image gets choppy or pixellated or you will need to wait for pages to load.

For a more detailed insight of your requirements you can use the advanced maritime bandwidth calculator

Non-Real-Time

non-real-time traffic (data-files, email, offline content) will use the available bandwidth to transfer data as fast as possible but whether the connection is fast or slow it will only affect the duration to transfer the file. This may however become important for transferring very large files within a certain timeframe so it is important to keep this in mind (especially uploading).

Below is based on having uninterrupted total capacity of the bandwidth required. In real-life-situations you will have to keep into account other users using a part of the total bandwidth, interference and weather influencing maximum throughput, TCP overhead, transmission interruptions and other negative factors, in the calculations below we have taken a 10% overhead into account but this could be higher