This is where you need to consider not only your own usage but the usage of your entire household.įor a two-person household where both people wanted to watch different 4K streams at the same time, a 50Mbps connection would be totally saturated – that’d be a good point to consider an NBN 100 plan, because most NBN plans typically run a little beneath their stated speed caps. To give that some context, here’s how different NBN speed tiers and their upload speeds change up the time it would take to upload a single 1GB file:

If you have lots of video conference meetings when you work at home, or want to stream your games online on Twitch, or need to back up large files to the cloud, that upload speed suddenly becomes a whole lot more important. However that’s not to say that you don’t need to care about your upload speeds. This is why upload speeds on consumer NBN plans are always considerably slower than download speeds, because for most of us the upload speeds can be much lower without impacting our use in perceptible ways.

Consider that last Netflix show you watched the request for the show from you (an upload) was probably only a few bits at most, while the file itself probably measured in at multiple gigabits of data in HD or 4K resolution. The download speed of a typical NBN plan is its primary selling point, because most of us are online data consumers, which is to say that we download a whole lot more than we upload by a significant margin.

What is upload and download speed mean