WFH Internet Readiness Checker

Why "fast internet" still fails work calls

Your plan says 100 Mbps, your speed test agrees, and yet your camera freezes every second meeting. Remote work does not run on one number. A workday asks three different things of a connection at once: download bandwidth for screenshares and incoming video, upload bandwidth for your own camera feed, and line stability for the minutes-long sessions that meetings actually are. A plan can say 100 Mbps while giving you 5 Mbps of upload — plenty for Netflix, painful when you present. And a line that drops for ten seconds every hour reads as fast on a speed test but quietly ruins calls, because tests measure a short burst while meetings need minutes of uninterrupted flow. This checker looks at six things that decide whether your home internet survives a workday: download speed, upload speed, ping, jitter, a backup connection, and how much of your speed your household is already eating.

How the readiness score is calculated

The score adds up to 100 across six checks, each weighted by how much it actually matters for calls. Download gets 30 points, with full marks at 25 Mbps — the line where screenshares stay smooth even while someone else is online. Upload gets 20 points, full marks at 5 Mbps, which is what keeps your own video clear. Ping gets 15 points, full marks at 60 ms or under; above that, the delay makes you talk over people. Jitter gets 10 points, full marks at 15 ms or under, because an unstable line turns voices robotic. The backup connection gets 10 points: a phone hotspot or a second line that keeps one outage from ending your workday. Household load gets 15 points, because each connected device wants about 3 Mbps at the same time. Score 85 or above and you are ready; 60 to 84 means mostly ready with one or two weak spots; under 60 means the connection will fight you on work days.

Worked example

Take a typical solid setup: 100 Mbps down, 20 up, ping 25 ms, jitter 8 ms, four hours of video calls a day, six devices at home, and a phone hotspot as backup. Download earns the full 30, upload the full 20, ping the full 15, jitter the full 10, the hotspot earns the backup 10, and six devices need about 18 Mbps at once — well under the 100 available — for the full 15 on household load. That is 100 out of 100, with all six checks passed. Note the data math: about four hours a day of video calls moves roughly 176 GB a month (4 hours × ~2 GB per hour × 22 workdays), worth counting if your plan has a cap. Now contrast a 20 down / 2 up line with the same household: it scores about 64 out of 100, passes only one check, and the fix-first advice points at download first, then upload — because under 25 Mbps screenshares stutter, and under 5 Mbps upload your camera pixelates even while you hear others fine.

Practical tips

Small changes beat new plans more often than people expect. Run your speed test at the time you actually work, not at midnight; evening congestion is the honest number. Prefer a wired connection or the 5 GHz band for the machine you work on — that single change often halves jitter. Reboot the router before big call days; it clears the slow rot that builds up in cheap firmware. Keep the hotspot SIM topped up and test it once a month, because a backup you never tested is a guess, not a plan. And fix problems in this order: upgrade upload first if it is under 5 Mbps, then fix jitter with a wired link or a router reboot, then add the hotspot backup so one outage can never end your workday.