This is the first question almost every Canadian customer asks us, and the honest answer is that the number you need is smaller than most people think — but the quality of the line matters far more than the number on your bill.
The short answer
For one TV, streaming one channel, here is what we tell people:
- HD (720p): about 8 Mbps
- Full HD (1080p): about 12 Mbps
- 4K (2160p): about 25 Mbps
Now add roughly that much again for every extra TV watching at the same time, and leave 15 to 20 Mbps spare for everyone else in the house who is browsing, gaming or on a video call.
So a family with two TVs on Full HD and a teenager online needs somewhere around 12 + 12 + 20 = 44 Mbps. Almost every Bell, Rogers, Telus, Videotron or Shaw plan sold in Canada today is well past that. If you are on a 150 Mbps plan you have plenty of room.
Why your 1 Gbps plan can still stutter
Here is the part that surprises people. We have customers on gigabit fibre who get the occasional freeze, and customers on 75 Mbps cable who never see one. Speed is not the whole story.
What actually breaks a live stream is jitter — how much your latency wobbles from moment to moment. A stream needs packets to arrive at a steady rhythm. If your line delivers 40 packets instantly and then pauses for 200 milliseconds, the player runs out of buffer and you get that half-second freeze at exactly the wrong moment in a hockey game.
Jitter usually comes from one of three places:
- Wi-Fi. By far the most common cause. A Fire Stick on 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi three rooms from the router will stutter no matter how fast your plan is.
- An overloaded router. Cheap ISP-supplied routers struggle when a dozen devices are connected.
- Evening congestion on older cable segments, which is a real thing in some neighbourhoods between 7pm and 10pm.
What to do about it
In order of how much difference it makes:
- Use a cable. Plug the box into the router with an Ethernet cable. If you cannot, use a powerline adapter. This single change fixes most buffering complaints we receive.
- Use 5 GHz Wi-Fi, not 2.4 GHz. Shorter range, far less interference.
- Drop 4K to Full HD on a weak line. On a 55-inch TV from across a living room, most people genuinely cannot tell the difference — but the stream will be rock solid.
- Restart the box once a week. Cheap Android boxes leak memory and slow down.
Does the provider matter, or just the speed?
Both, but not equally. Among internet protocol television providers the differences in raw throughput are small; what separates them is jitter. Two lines advertising the same 500 Mbps can behave very differently on a live stream, and that is the number nobody puts on a bill.
This is also why comparing internet protocol TV providers on headline speed alone is close to useless. A 150 Mbps fibre line with 10 ms latency will carry more simultaneous streams cleanly than a 1 Gbps connection that spikes to 200 ms every few minutes.
Check your own line
Rather than guess, run the stream checker on our homepage. It measures the latency from your own browser and tells you what your household can carry. We also publish typical latency by Canadian provider — Bell, Rogers, Telus, Videotron, Shaw, SaskTel, Cogeco, EastLink and Starlink — so you can see where your ISP usually sits.
What about rural Canada?
Fixed LTE and Starlink both work. Starlink customers generally get a good picture, though we suggest Full HD rather than 4K because the latency swings more than fibre. On rural fixed LTE, stick to HD or Full HD and wire the box. We have plenty of happy customers on both — just set the quality sensibly rather than forcing 4K and being disappointed.
If you are unsure, take the free trial and test it on your own connection before you pay. That is exactly what it is for.