Best broadband for working from home

A home-working connection is judged on three things, and download speed is not one of them. The first is upload, the speed of everything you send out: your face on a video call, files going up to the cloud, a big document off to a client. The second is reliability, a line that does not wobble or drop, because a dropout in a meeting costs you more than a slow download ever will. The third is a backup, so a fault on the line does not cost you a morning's pay.

The numbers are smaller than you would guess. A single video call on Teams or Zoom uses only about 5 Mbps of upload, and the rest of the working day, email, documents, the odd large file, barely registers. One person working from home wants around 10 Mbps of upload to be comfortable; two people on calls at once want 20 Mbps or more. Run the full sum on what speed you actually need and for most home workers it lands well short of the headline tiers.

The single biggest upgrade a home worker can make is moving to full fibre, and the reason is upload. Older part-copper FTTC lines are lopsided: you might get 50 Mbps down but only 10 up, because the copper was built for receiving, not sending. That weak upload is exactly what makes your video call freeze while everyone else looks fine.

Full fibre fixes it. Most full-fibre lines are symmetric or close to it, so a 100 Mbps package gives you 100 Mbps up as well as down. For anyone who lives on video calls or pushes files to the cloud, that is transformative, and it is the most concrete reason to switch that exists. Full fibre is also steadier under load and holds its latency low, which keeps calls smooth. FTTC, cable and 5G each have their place, but for home working the verdict is simple: get full fibre if you can.

The altnets are worth a hard look here. The newer full-fibre networks, the likes of Hyperoptic, Community Fibre, YouFibre, Gigaclear and toob, are built symmetric from the ground up and priced keenly, so you often get genuine matching upload for less than a big-name part-fibre deal. A recognisable logo is not the same as a better line for working.

When you compare deals, ignore the giant download figure for a moment and find the upload speed, the one the adverts keep quiet about. On a full-fibre line it will roughly match the download. On an older fibre line it will be a fraction of it, and that fraction is your ceiling for calls and uploads. If you only check one number before you buy a home-working line, make it the upload.

Latency matters too, the steadiness of the connection rather than its raw speed. A line with low, stable latency keeps a call crisp; a jittery one makes you the person who keeps cutting out. Full fibre is the steadiest of the lot, and a good ping matters as much on a video call as it does in a ranked match.

Here is the bit the speed-obsessed guides skip. If your only connection goes down on a deadline day, the cost is not measured in megabits, it is measured in a morning of work you cannot do. A home worker needs a plan B.

The cheapest version is a 4G or 5G mobile broadband hub kept on standby, often around £20 a month, that you switch to when the main line fails. Some providers bake this in, Vodafone Pro, for instance, includes a 4G backup as standard. Even tethering to your phone in a pinch beats sitting helpless. It is a small cost against the price of explaining to a client why you vanished mid-call. The standalone hubs live with the mobile broadband deals.

Once the line is good, how you connect to it decides how steady your calls feel. Wire in where you can: an ethernet cable from your laptop to the router is steadier and lower-latency than wifi, and for a fixed desk there is no reason not to. If the office is a spare room far from the router, that is a coverage problem, and a mesh system fixes it better than a faster package does, and whether your router is the problem is worth five minutes before you buy either. And if calls still stutter on a healthy line, the fixes in how to speed up your broadband are worth ten minutes before you blame the provider.

Working from home does not need a gigabit line, and buying one will not make your calls any smoother. A 100 to 300 Mbps full-fibre line, with its matching upload, covers a busy household of home workers comfortably and costs a fraction of the top tier. Spend the difference on the backup instead, it will do more for your working day than the extra speed ever would. If your current deal feels dear for what it delivers, our overpayment check will tell you in a minute whether you are over the odds.

So before you upgrade for the home office, check the upload not the download, get on full fibre if you can and line up a backup. Here are the live full-fibre deals at your address, the connection with the symmetric upload home working actually needs, from the cheapest going to the fastest.