How to Calculate the Required Bandwidth

Depending on available plans with your Internet service provider, you can upgrade or downgrade according to your needs. Calculating how long it takes you to download a certain amount of information can tell you a lot about your actual bandwidth demand and whether you should ask your service provider to give you more bandwidth. You can best determine this by seeing how long it would take you to download a 1GB file.

Instructions

1. Multiply the amount of downstream bandwidth you have in megabits by 1024. If you do not know how much downstream bandwidth you have, call your ISP (your Internet service) and ask them how many megabits of downstream bandwidth they give you in your service plan.

2. Divide the result by eight to get the amount of actual kilobytes per second at which you download. This signifies that, under ideal conditions, you download this amount of data every second.

3. Divide 1048576 by the download rate you just got as a result of your last two operations. One gigabyte gives you 1048576 kilobytes (1024 squared). When you divide it by the download rate, you get the amount of seconds it will take you to download a file 1GB in size.

4. Ask your ISP about other plans they have which are faster if you want to increase your bandwidth.

5. Calculate the downstream rates of each plan for a 1GB file by repeating Steps 1 to 3 to get the approximate amount of completion time you get if you switch to that plan.

References

• My Connection Server: Understanding Internet Speeds