It’s Friday night and it’s time to watch Netflix & chill. You flick to your next favorite series, click on the next episode and then the upload slows to a halt! Then when it does eventually crank, it's blur-city!!!! 

It may be time to check to see if you have the right internet speed to serve your household’s binging needs. Streaming video on Netflix is one of the most data intensive activities you can use your internet connection for and if you have multiple users in the house all using the internet you need to ensure you have enough capacity.

Netflix can be watched with internet speeds as slow as 0.5Mbps per second, but Netflix recommends 3Mbps for SD quality and 5Mbps for HD. If you want to watch 4K content, Netflix recommends 25Mbps. 

0.5 Mbps = Any streaming
3 Mbps = SD or DVD quality
5 Mbps = HD quality
25 Mbps = Ultra HD/4K quality

What are Mbps? Your internet download speed is measured in megabits per second. Anything above 25 Mbps is considered high-speed internet.

Netflix, of course, isn't the only streaming service available. There’s also Stan, Foxtel Now, Amazon Prime Video, as well as local catch-up services including ABC iview and SBS On Demand. Other streaming services tend to use roughly the same amount of bandwidth as Netflix.

The important bit to understand is that whilst internet plans are typically providing unlimited data, the ability to have multiple people all streaming or accessing the internet at the same time is all about the available bandwidth or capacity of your service.  In very simple terms, if you have a 25 Mbps speed service and are watching Netflix in Ultra HD that means there is zero capacity left for anything else and if someone else tries to use the internet in the house, everything will slow down.

The good news? It simply comes down to tweaking the right speed plan to cater for the size of the household. For example, with our Mint NBN plans:
 

Here’s a more detailed summary of the plans and their capacity in relation to your household needs:

If you would like assistance or to work out if your plan is aligned to the amount of streaming your household requires, please don’t hesitate in contacting us at michael.speglic@minttelecom.com.au