If you work from home and your connection is frustrating, the odds are strongly against download speed being the cause. A 67 Mbps line has plenty of download capacity for anything an office job throws at it.
What fails is one of three other things, and only one of them appears in the advertising.
1. Upload — the number nobody quotes
Your outgoing video on a call is upload. So is every file you send, every cloud backup, every screen share.
The gap between technologies here is enormous and almost entirely undiscussed:
| Connection | Typical download | Typical upload |
|---|---|---|
| FTTC (copper to the cabinet) | 40-70 Mbps | 10-20 Mbps |
| Full fibre, asymmetric | 100-900 Mbps | 20-100 Mbps |
| Full fibre, symmetric | 150-900 Mbps | Same as download |
A single HD video call needs 3-4 Mbps up. That sounds trivial against 20 Mbps until you add a second person on a call, a cloud backup running, and someone uploading photos. Upload saturates far more easily than download, and when it does, the symptom is not “slow internet” — it is you freezing while everyone else looks fine to you.
That is the tell. If other people say you are frozen but your screen looks fine, your upload is the problem. Your download is still delivering their video perfectly; yours is not getting out.
Symmetric full fibre — where upload matches download — is the single most useful upgrade for home workers, and it is frequently available from altnets at prices comparable to asymmetric packages from larger providers.
2. Latency and jitter
Latency is round-trip time. Jitter is how much it varies.
For calls, jitter is worse than latency. A consistent 40 ms is fine. A connection swinging between 15 ms and 200 ms produces the choppy, robotic audio everyone recognises, even with plenty of bandwidth spare.
Roughly what to expect: full fibre in the single digits to low teens, FTTC around 15-30 ms, fixed wireless usually low on a well-engineered link, 4G/5G low but variable, satellite materially higher.
For a job that involves talking to people, a full-fibre 150 Mbps line beats a 900 Mbps FTTC-era connection every time.
3. Consistency — the one you only notice when it fails
A connection that is excellent 99% of the time and drops for ninety seconds during your weekly management meeting is, professionally, a bad connection.
Things that cause it: contention at peak times, a failing master socket or internal wiring, an overheating router, Wi-Fi interference from neighbours, and — genuinely common — a router that has been powered on continuously for three years.
Before assuming the line is at fault, restart the router. If a restart reliably fixes it for a few weeks, the router is the problem, not the connection.
What to actually buy
Prioritise upload over download. If you are choosing between 500/50 and 150/150, and you work from home, take the symmetric one.
Prioritise full fibre over headline speed. FTTP at 150 Mbps will feel better than FTTC at its theoretical maximum, because latency and stability are structurally better.
Do not over-buy download. Beyond about 100 Mbps, extra download capacity does nothing for a working day unless you move very large files.
Check the technology, not just the number. “Fibre broadband” has historically been used to describe part-copper connections. If it matters to you, look for “full fibre” or FTTP explicitly.
The redundancy question
If your income depends on being online, one connection is a single point of failure.
A mobile backup is the cheap version: a data SIM in a spare phone, tethered when the line goes down. A rolling monthly SIM costs a few pounds a month and turns an outage from a crisis into an inconvenience.
Two fixed lines from different networks is the serious version — one Openreach, one altnet or cable. Expensive, but genuinely independent: a street-level fault on one rarely affects the other. Worth it only if downtime costs you real money.
What does not work is two providers on the same network. If both ride Openreach and the fault is in the local infrastructure, you have paid twice for the same outage.
Should you buy business broadband?
Usually not, but the question is worth asking properly and we cover it separately. In short: business packages typically offer a faster fault-fix commitment, sometimes a static IP, and support that answers quicker. They cost more and often deliver the same physical connection.
The deciding factor is what an outage costs you. If a day offline means a day unpaid, a repair commitment measured in hours rather than days is worth paying for. If it means an awkward afternoon, it is not.
Tax, briefly
If you are self-employed or run a limited company, broadband used for work may be partly deductible, and the rules differ depending on whether the line is in your name or the company’s and whether there is any personal use. This is genuinely worth ten minutes with an accountant rather than a guess from a comparison site — the numbers are small but the rules are fiddly.
Before you upgrade, check it is not your Wi-Fi
The most common cause of “my work connection is bad” is not the connection.
Plug a laptop into the router with a cable and run a speed test. If that is fast and Wi-Fi is not, no package upgrade will help you — the bottleneck is between your desk and the router. We have a whole guide on this, because it is the single most frequent misdiagnosis in home broadband.
If you take one action from this page: run that cabled test before spending money.
Sources
- ofcom.org.uk — Ofcom UK Home Broadband Performance research
- ofcom.org.uk — Ofcom broadband speeds and reliability guidance
- ofcom.org.uk — Ofcom automatic compensation for loss of service