Internet Plan Calculator

Picking an internet plan comes down to matching speed to how your household actually uses the connection, so you neither pay for bandwidth you'll never touch nor fight constant buffering. For reference, the FCC's benchmark for high-speed home broadband has been 100 Mbps download and 20 Mbps upload since its March 2024 Section 706 report, and its August 2026 report kept that benchmark.

The calculator asks two things: how many people use the connection and how many video streams run at the same time. It allows 25 Mbps per user plus 25 Mbps per simultaneous stream, then rounds the total up to the next common plan tier: 100, 300, 500, or 1,000 Mbps. Each tier carries an illustrative monthly price of $40, $60, $80, or $100, the calculator's own round numbers rather than any provider's rates. The recommendation is for download speed only; the calculator doesn't size upload.

It's just as easy to overbuy as to underbuy, and plenty of providers market tiers well past what an ordinary household ever uses. Upload speed deserves its own look if you regularly send large files, play online, or sit in long video meetings, because most plans offer much slower uploads than downloads. The figure people most often miss entirely is the load of several users and devices running at the same time.