What Is the Minimum Internet Speed Required To Stream 4K Videos?

I often stream 4K videos on YouTube and sometimes view 4K 60 FPS, which almost bursts my whole internet connection. Still, I can do other tasks on Internet pretty smoothly. How?

I use 50 Mb/s FTTH (Fiber to the Home) connection at home and everything just flies. Still to find out what would be the minimum requirement to watch 4K videos.

So I dig in to my wireless router’s settings and adjusted the bandwidth throttle option and started analyzing the minimum, optimum, and recommended internet speed to stream 4K videos.

Minimum: 15-20 Mb/s (Not smooth, but playable; only YouTube works best (due to their modern video compression), Netflix struggles all the time).

I found that my ISP has direct peering with YouTube, thus no matter what speed I use it plays everything very smooth. So I checked same with my Mobile network (JIO 4G – 14Mb/s UP & 6Mb/s DOWN) still YouTube was streamable (it buffers at beginning but plays better upon start) so I have to conclude that YouTube works most of the time due to its highly compressed video formats.

Optimum: 25–30 Mb/s (Smooth, Netflix struggles on beginning and while dragging the timeline). Once video is started, there is no buffer or lag.

Recommended: 50 Mb/s (Smooth, everything is streamable even while dragging the timeline). I think this should be the best speed for 4K video content use. I have seen that the connection never struggle to load 4K video content even when multiple devices are connected to the same network and being utilized at the same time.

Maximum – Depends upon you! But anything is above 50 Mb/s is best.

Latency is also important here, because you have to wait more in the beginning if you have high latency. Thus, anything below 50 ms is better and under 20 ms is best.

Before using FTTH I was using local broadband connection, and it used to be slow and local pings were high like 10-20 ms and during rush hours it like 30-40 ms or below.

Now on FTTH it is almost 1 or 2 ms even on busy hours.

If you are using basic and local broadband connection then I would only recommend 25 Mb/s as the minimum, because local ISP share their backbone with large number of local users and on peak time it may struggle if you are on the slower side. So make sure your ISP provides you the fastest connection possible. Although it won’t be cheaper, but for smoother experience you have to pay extra bucks.