What internet speed do you need for online gaming?
Playing online uses only a small amount of bandwidth, so a plan of 25 to 50 Mbps is enough for one player. What decides lag is ping, jitter and extra delay under load. Aim for a ping under 50 ms, jitter under 15 ms and a bufferbloat grade of A or B.
Speed and responsiveness are different things
Speed (Mbps) is how much data can flow per second, like the width of a pipe. Responsiveness is how long a single small message takes to arrive, like how quickly water starts to flow. A game sends many tiny messages: where you moved, where you shot. They are small, so they need very little bandwidth, but each one needs to arrive quickly and on time.
What to aim for
| Measure | Good | What happens above it |
|---|---|---|
| Ping (idle) | Under 20 ms is excellent, under 50 ms is good | 50 to 80 ms is playable with some lag. Above 80 ms is noticeable in fast games. |
| Jitter | Under 15 ms | Movement and hits feel uneven, even when the average ping looks fine. |
| Bufferbloat | Grade A (under 30 ms extra) or B (under 60 ms) | Lag spikes whenever someone else on the network downloads or uploads. |
These are rule-of-thumb ranges that match the SpeedUp gaming verdict, not an official standard. Fast shooters and fighting games feel delay the most. Turn-based and strategy games hardly notice it.
Ping depends on distance
Signals in fibre travel at roughly two thirds of the speed of light, which works out to about 1 ms of round trip for every 100 km to the server, at best. A server 3,000 km away cannot have a ping below about 30 ms, whatever plan you pay for. Cloudflare gives a similar picture: users about 100 miles from a data centre typically see 5 to 10 ms, and users about 2,200 miles away see closer to 40 to 50 ms.
SpeedUp measures your ping to the nearest Cloudflare server, not to your game's server. That makes it a good test of the quality of your own connection, but your in-game ping will differ. Use the game's own ping display for the server you play on.
When speed does matter
- Downloads and updates. Modern games can be tens of gigabytes. See Mbps vs MB/s for how long that takes.
- Cloud gaming. These services stream video to you, so they need speeds closer to 4K streaming. Check the figure on your service's own page.
How to reduce lag
- Play on a cable if you can. Wi-Fi adds delay and jitter.
- Check your bufferbloat grade. If it is C or D, see how to fix bufferbloat.
- Pause downloads, backups and streams on other devices while you play.
- Choose the game server region closest to you.
- Restart the router now and then, and keep its firmware up to date.
- Use a VPN only if it clearly helps. It usually adds distance and delay.