Bandwidth Requirement Calculator 2026 — GlobalCalc

GlobalCalc

Inputs

Concurrent users

Per-user bandwidth (Mbps)

Peak factor

Target link utilization

Results update as you type

Results

Link needed (Mbps)

740.57

Average demand (Mbps)—

Peak demand (Mbps)—

Peak plus protocol overhead (Mbps)—

Headroom on the link (Mbps)—

Link needed (Gbps)—

Users a 100 Mbps link supports—

Per-user share if the link filled—

Reviewed September 2026. Computing arithmetic: bytes, bits, seconds and probabilities do not change by country. US broadband is advertized in megabits per second (Mbps).

All calculations run 100% in your browser. The calculator code does not submit your figures to GlobalCalc to obtain a result.

About bandwidth requirement

Method

How the bandwidth requirement calculator works

Raw requirement is users times per-user bandwidth times a peak factor. The part people miss is that a link should not be sized to its requirement: utilization above about 70% makes latency climb sharply, because packets start queueing.

So the link you buy is the requirement divided by the utilization target, not the requirement itself.

Formula: link = users × per-user × peak / utilisation target

Data

Worked examples

Inputs	Link needed (Mbps)	Note
120 users at 2.5 Mbps	740.57	about 740 Mbps
Video-heavy users	2,369.83	over 2 Gbps
A full link	518.4	no headroom — latency suffers

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

How much bandwidth per user?

Ordinary office work is 0.5 to 2 Mbps; video calls 2 to 4; 4K streaming 15 to 25. It depends entirely on what they do.

Why not size the link to the demand?

Because a link at 100% utilization queues. Latency and jitter climb sharply above about 70%, which users experience as the network being slow even though throughput is fine.

What is a peak factor?

How much busier the busy hour is than the average. 1.5 to 2 is typical; a school at lesson change or an office at 9am is higher.

What is protocol overhead?

Headers, retransmissions and acknowledgements. Around 5 to 10% of raw throughput on typical traffic.

Does this account for bursts?

Only through the peak factor. Genuinely bursty traffic needs buffering or shaping as well as capacity.

Sources

Where these figures come from

IEC 80000-13 — Information science and technology (quantities and units) — the decimal (kB, MB) versus binary (KiB, MiB) prefixes used throughout
RFC 4632 — Classless Inter-domain Routing (CIDR) — the address-plan arithmetic behind the subnet calculator
RFC 1918 — Address Allocation for Private Internets — the private ranges the subnet calculator recognises
NIST SP 800-63B — Digital Identity Guidelines, Authentication — length over composition rules; the basis of the password guidance here
NIST SP 800-57 Part 1 — Recommendation for Key Management — key-strength comparisons used by the key-space calculator
NIST — Digital Identity Guidelines (SP 800-63) — US federal authentication standard

Last checked: September 2026. Units follow the SI decimal convention (IEC 80000-13 defines the binary alternatives); network and security figures cite the defining standard.