It is the question every business asks and no advert answers honestly: how much internet do we actually need? Buy too little and everything crawls at eleven in the morning. Buy too much and you are paying for a motorway to run a milk float down. Here is a simple, honest way to work it out, with a couple of tables you can hold up against your own office.
Start with what each activity uses
Everything your team does has a rough bandwidth cost. These figures are guides, not gospel, quality settings and software vary, but they are close enough to plan with.
| Activity | Rough usage | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Email, browsing, cloud docs | ~1 to 3 Mbps each | Bursty; light most of the time |
| Video meeting (HD) | ~2 to 4 Mbps each way | Upload matters as much as download |
| VoIP phone call | ~0.1 Mbps each | Tiny, but hates latency and jitter |
| CCTV camera to cloud | ~1 to 4 Mbps upload each | Multiplies fast with more cameras |
| 4K video stream | ~25 Mbps each | Usually leisure, not work |
| Large file / cloud backup | As much as you give it | Will happily fill the whole line |
| AI assistant (text) | Very little | Rewards low latency more than speed |
| AI image or video work | Heavier bursts | Leans on a solid upload |
Do not just add it all up
The classic mistake is totting up every activity for every employee and buying that. Real offices never hit that number, because people do not all do the heavy things at the same instant. The trick is to estimate your realistic peak: how many people are genuinely doing something demanding at the same time, add your always-on load like CCTV and backups, then leave some headroom on top. That headroom matters, because a line that runs flat out at its limit feels slow long before it is truly full.
A quick sizing guide
Match your team to the nearest row, then read across. This is a starting point, not a rule, adjust up for the things in the next section.
| Team size | Comfortable starting point | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| 1 to 5 | Around 100 Mbps | Upload, if you do calls or CCTV |
| 5 to 20 | 100 to 300 Mbps | Symmetric if lots of calls or backups |
| 20 to 50 | 300 Mbps to a symmetric leased line | Contention, upload, failover |
| 50+ | Symmetric leased line with failover | Resilience becomes as important as speed |
Add extra for these
- CCTV. Several cameras recording offsite is a constant upload load. Count it separately and add it on top.
- Heavy file transfer. Design, media, engineering and anyone moving multi-gigabyte files daily should size up, ideally symmetric.
- On-site servers accessed remotely. If people connect in from elsewhere, your upload is their download.
- Growth. Buy for where you will be in a year or two, not just today.
- Resilience. If being offline stops you trading, failover matters more than a bigger headline number.
A worked example. A 12-person office: six people on calls and cloud apps at once (roughly 20 to 25 Mbps up and down with headroom), four HD cameras to the cloud (around 12 Mbps of steady upload), plus the odd large file. A well-run 100 Mbps line copes comfortably, but because the calls and cameras lean on upload, a symmetric connection would feel noticeably calmer than a big-download broadband product.
How Synergy Max helps
We size connections for a living, so instead of guessing, we look at your headcount, your calls, your cameras, your cloud apps and where you are heading, then recommend a line that fits with sensible headroom, the right upload and failover where it counts. It pairs naturally with our guides to what the numbers mean and whether you really need 100 Mbps or a gigabit.