How Much Internet Speed Does Your Business Actually Need? A Practical Australian Guide

If you have ever asked your internet provider for a faster plan because things felt slow at the office, you are not alone. But speed alone is rarely the full story. Australian businesses regularly pay for plans they do not need, or struggle with plans that look impressive on paper but perform poorly in practice.

This guide gives you a practical, numbers-based way to work out exactly what your business needs — whether you are looking at your first office internet plan or wondering whether it is time to upgrade.

Why "How Fast Is Your Internet?" Is the Wrong Question

When most people think about business internet, they think about download speed. How many megabits per second does the plan offer? Is 100 Mbps enough? Should we get 250 Mbps? These feel like the right questions, but they only tell part of the story.

The more useful questions are:

What are you actually using the internet for? A business running VoIP calls and cloud accounting has fundamentally different needs from one uploading large video files to a client server every day.

How many people are online simultaneously at peak? Not how many staff you have — how many are actively using bandwidth-hungry applications at the same moment. A 20-person office where half the team is in the field has very different demands from one where everyone is at a desk from 8:30am.

What is the cost of slowness? If your team drops video calls with clients or cannot access the cloud CRM during business hours, there is a real dollar value attached to that. Slow internet is not just annoying — it has a measurable productivity cost.

Beyond raw download speed, three other factors determine whether your internet actually performs:

Upload speed is frequently overlooked. Standard NBN plans are heavily asymmetric — 100 Mbps download but only 20 Mbps upload is common. For a business with staff on simultaneous video calls or syncing files to SharePoint, upload is often the bottleneck. We will cover this in detail later.

Latency is the round-trip time for data to travel from your office to a remote server and back, measured in milliseconds. Low latency is essential for real-time communication like VoIP and video conferencing. A fast download speed with high latency will still produce choppy, delayed calls.

Contention refers to how many users share the underlying infrastructure. A 100 Mbps plan on a heavily contended network may only deliver 40–60 Mbps during peak business hours. Business-grade plans typically have better capacity provisioning to reduce this problem.

Understanding all four factors — download speed, upload speed, latency, and contention — gives you a complete picture of what your business actually needs.

The Bandwidth Demands of Common Business Applications

Before you can calculate a bandwidth requirement, you need to understand how much each application actually consumes. The figures below represent real-world usage across common business tools.

A few things stand out. The numbers are per user, so they compound quickly across a busy office. Several critical applications (video calls, cloud sync, backups) depend heavily on upload speed, not just download. And for VoIP and remote desktop, latency matters more than headline bandwidth — a business running 10 simultaneous VoIP calls needs only about 1 Mbps for voice, but poor call quality on a congested or high-latency line will occur regardless of plan speed.

How to Calculate Your Business's Bandwidth Requirement

Working out what your business needs does not require an IT degree. Follow these five steps.

Step 1 — Count concurrent users, not total staff.

Think about your busiest moment in the working day. How many people are actively using the internet at exactly the same time? Not how many are employed — how many are at their desks, on calls, accessing cloud tools, simultaneously. For most office businesses, this is between 70 and 90 per cent of office-based staff during peak hours.

Step 2 — Identify the top three applications people use at the same time.

In most offices this is some combination of video conferencing (Teams or Zoom), a cloud-hosted business application (accounting software, CRM, or ERP), and cloud file sync (OneDrive or Dropbox) running in the background.

Step 3 — Multiply the per-user recommended figure by your concurrent user count.

Add the recommended bandwidth for your top applications per user, then multiply by concurrent users. This gives you a baseline download and upload requirement.

Step 4 — Add 30–50% headroom.

Staff numbers change, new tools get adopted. Building in a buffer means you are not immediately back at capacity after your next hire. Use 40% as a practical rule of thumb.

Step 5 — Calculate upload requirements separately.

Repeat steps 3 and 4 using the upload figures. This is where many businesses discover their current plan falls short.

A worked example: 15-person office

A professional services business with 15 staff, 13 at their desks at peak. All use Teams video calls in HD, a cloud-based practice management system, and OneDrive sync in the background.

• HD group video calls: 8 Mbps × 13 users = 104 Mbps down, 104 Mbps up
• Cloud business app: 5 Mbps × 13 users = 65 Mbps down
• OneDrive sync (background): 5 Mbps up × 13 users = 65 Mbps up

Combined baseline: approximately 169 Mbps download, 169 Mbps upload. Add 40% headroom: approximately 237 Mbps each way.

Compare that to a standard NBN 100/20 plan. Even if the download were sufficient, the 20 Mbps upload limit would be critically inadequate. The office would experience dropped video calls, failed syncs, and consistent mid-morning slowdowns.

A more appropriate starting point is an NBN 250/25 or 1000/50 plan — or better, an FTTP plan with a higher upload tier, or an Enterprise Ethernet solution with symmetrical speeds. See our guide to NBN business vs enterprise ethernet for when to step beyond standard NBN.

Why Upload Speed Is Often the Bottleneck

If there is one thing most businesses get wrong when choosing an internet plan, it is underestimating upload speed.

Standard NBN plans are built around the residential internet model, where people downloaded far more than they uploaded. So providers built heavily asymmetric plans — 100/20, 250/25, even 1000/50 — where download speeds are impressive and upload speeds are an afterthought.

Modern business internet does not work this way. Each person on a video call uploads their audio and video stream continuously. Screen sharing is upload traffic. Every file saved to OneDrive or SharePoint is upload traffic. Cloud backups, email attachments, sending large files to clients, VoIP calls — all rely on upload.

In a 10-person office where four staff are on HD video calls and the rest are in cloud applications with OneDrive sync active, upload demand could easily exceed 50–70 Mbps. An NBN 250/25 plan provides just 25 Mbps of upload capacity. The download speed is adequate; the upload speed is the bottleneck.

This is why the technology type and tier of your internet connection matters, not just the plan label.

FTTP (Fibre to the Premises) allows you to choose higher upload tiers. NBN's FTTP plans include options with 100 Mbps upload or greater — a significant improvement over the 20–50 Mbps upload caps common on FTTC and FTTN connections.

Enterprise Ethernet provides symmetrical speeds — typically 10/10, 20/20, 50/50, or 100/100 Mbps and beyond. If your business is upload-intensive, a 50/50 Enterprise Ethernet service often outperforms a 250/25 NBN plan in practical terms. It also typically comes with a Service Level Agreement, something residential and many business NBN plans lack.

See our comparison of upload vs download speed for a closer look at how to read an internet plan's numbers.

Latency — The Speed Metric That Doesn't Show on the Label

You can be on a 1000 Mbps plan and still have poor call quality. If that surprises you, it is worth understanding latency.

Latency is the round-trip time for a data packet to travel from your device, through your ISP's network, to a remote server, and back again. It is measured in milliseconds (ms). A lower number is better.

VoIP calls, video conferences, and remote desktop sessions all require data to travel back and forth in close to real time. If there is a delay in each round trip, the conversation sounds delayed, robotic, or choppy — even if you have plenty of bandwidth.

For VoIP calls, the general target is under 150ms one-way delay. In practice, you want round-trip latency well under 100ms. Above 150ms, callers notice the delay; above 300ms, calls become difficult to hold.

For video conferencing, latency combines with jitter (variation in packet arrival times) to produce lip-sync issues, freezing, and audio dropouts — regardless of available bandwidth.

Typical latency by connection type in Australia:

• NBN FTTP or FTTC (fibre to the premises or kerb): 10–20ms
• NBN FTTN (fibre to the node, copper last mile): 15–30ms, can be higher on degraded copper
• Fixed wireless (NBN or private): 20–50ms
• Starlink satellite: 20–60ms under normal conditions, can spike higher during congestion
• Older satellite internet (geostationary): 600ms+ — essentially unusable for real-time voice

If your business relies on VoIP as your primary phone system, latency should be a factor in your provider and technology selection, not an afterthought. See our detailed guide to VoIP bandwidth requirements for a full breakdown.

Congestion and Contention — When Your Speed Is Not Actually Your Speed

Here is something your internet provider's marketing material will not tell you: the speed on your plan is a theoretical maximum, not a guarantee.

Internet infrastructure is shared. When many users in your area are online simultaneously, the available capacity is divided between them. This is called contention, and it peaks during business hours — which is exactly when your office needs the connection most.

The NBN network uses a mechanism called CVC (Connectivity Virtual Circuit) to allocate capacity between internet service providers and their customers. Providers who purchase insufficient CVC experience congestion at peak times, and customers see speeds well below their plan's theoretical maximum.

The tell-tale sign is a speed test that returns very different results at different times of day. If you get 95 Mbps at 7am on a 100 Mbps plan but only 40 Mbps at 10am on a Tuesday, congestion is almost certainly the cause.

Business-grade plans from reputable providers typically include better CVC provisioning so peak-hour congestion is less severe. This is one of the meaningful differences between a business plan and a residential plan — not just SLA response times and static IP addresses.

Dedicated internet access (such as Enterprise Ethernet) bypasses the shared NBN infrastructure entirely. Your business gets a direct, dedicated connection with guaranteed speeds. This comes at a higher cost, but for businesses where internet downtime or slowdowns have a direct revenue impact, it is often the right decision. Our guide to dedicated vs shared internet explains when the upgrade makes financial sense.

If you suspect congestion, run speed tests at 7am, 10am, 1pm, and 5pm on a weekday and compare results. Meaningful variation — particularly a drop during business hours — points to contention on your provider's network.

When to Upgrade Your Internet

Here are the clear signals that your current internet is not meeting your business's needs.

Video calls are regularly dropping or pixelating. If this happens consistently during business hours but not early morning or evening, congestion or inadequate upload speed is the likely cause.

Cloud applications are slow mid-morning. Your accounting software, CRM, or project management tool loads quickly when you first arrive but slows down noticeably once the whole team is in. This points to bandwidth being consumed faster than it is available during peak hours.

Staff are complaining about slow downloads. Software updates, large client files, or design assets take far longer than expected. Check whether the download speed at that moment matches your plan speed.

Cloud backups are not completing during business hours. If your overnight backup window is expanding into business hours because upload speed is insufficient, that is both a performance and a business continuity risk.

Your speed test results are consistently below your plan speed during work hours. If you are getting less than 70% of advertised speed during business hours, you have a problem worth investigating — whether a provider switch, a plan upgrade, or a technology change.

Your team has grown since you last reviewed your plan. If you had 8 staff when you set up the plan and now have 18, your bandwidth requirement may have more than doubled. Plans do not scale automatically.

If you are in a location not served by FTTP or quality fixed-line NBN, it is also worth exploring whether fixed wireless internet provides a more reliable alternative. See our guide to fixed wireless internet for coverage and suitability.

Pickle's Business Internet Plans — Built for Australian Businesses

Pickle is an Australian telecommunications provider built specifically for businesses. We are not a residential internet provider who also does business — business connectivity is what we do.

Our NBN business plans and fixed wireless options are sized and provisioned for real Australian offices, not residential Netflix subscribers. When you call us, you talk to someone who understands the difference between FTTN and FTTP, can read your speed test results, and can work out whether a plan upgrade, a technology change, or a provider switch is the right answer.

We offer:

• NBN business plans across multiple speed tiers, with appropriate CVC provisioning for business use
• Fixed wireless internet for businesses where fibre or cable options are limited or unreliable
• Enterprise Ethernet for businesses needing guaranteed, symmetrical speeds and SLA-backed service
• VoIP phone systems that we design to work with the connection quality your location supports

If you are reviewing your current plan or setting up a new office, we are happy to work through the numbers with you and give you a straightforward recommendation.

Call us on 1300 688 588 or email [email protected] to get started.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How much internet speed do I need for a 10-person office?

A: It depends on what those 10 people are doing simultaneously. If they are primarily on video calls, using cloud applications, and syncing files, expect to need 150–200 Mbps download and 80–120 Mbps upload as a comfortable baseline before headroom. A standard NBN 100/20 plan will not cover that — particularly on upload. An NBN 250/25 plan is a better minimum, though the upload cap is still restrictive. For upload-intensive offices, FTTP with a higher upload tier or an Enterprise Ethernet service is worth considering.

Q: Why is my internet slow even though I am on a high-speed plan?

A: The most common cause is peak-hour congestion — your plan speed is a maximum, not a guarantee, and if your provider has not purchased sufficient network capacity, speeds drop during business hours. Other causes include upload speed being the constraint rather than download, high latency affecting real-time applications even when bandwidth is adequate, a physical connection issue at your premises, or a router that cannot sustain the full plan speed. Running speed tests at different times of day is the first useful diagnostic step.

Q: Does video conferencing use a lot of internet data?

A: Yes, relative to basic browsing and email — and it uses both download and upload simultaneously. A single HD 1:1 call on Teams or Zoom requires around 3 Mbps each way. A group HD call can require 8 Mbps per participant in each direction. Across an office with multiple concurrent calls, video conferencing alone can consume 60–80 Mbps of upload capacity. A single participant on continuous video meetings can also use 2–4 GB per hour, so monthly data limits matter if your plan has a cap.

Q: What internet speed do I need for VoIP phone calls?

A: VoIP is surprisingly light on bandwidth — around 0.1 Mbps (100 Kbps) per concurrent call is sufficient. A business with 10 simultaneous calls needs only about 1 Mbps of upload and download for voice. However, bandwidth is almost irrelevant if your latency is high. VoIP call quality degrades noticeably when round-trip latency exceeds 150ms, and becomes problematic above 200ms. For VoIP, prioritise a low-latency, low-jitter connection over raw speed. This means avoiding high-latency technologies like satellite internet for any site using VoIP as a primary phone system.

Q: How do I check if my current internet speed is actually what I am paying for?

A: Run a speed test at fast.com or speedtest.net from a computer connected via ethernet (not Wi-Fi, which introduces its own limitations). Record download speed, upload speed, and latency. Repeat the test before 8am, at 10am, at 1pm, and at 5pm on a weekday. If your business-hours results are significantly lower than off-peak — particularly below 70% of your plan speed — you are likely experiencing congestion. Contact your provider if there is a consistent shortfall against the advertised speed.