Speeds on a data plan read like a foreign language until you translate them into things you actually do. Do that, and something surprising appears: most of a traveller’s day needs a fraction of the speed people pay for. And because the streaming and video-call services publish their own numbers, none of this has to be guesswork.
The numbers, from the people who set them
YouTube’s help centre recommends 0.7 Mbps for 360p, 1.1 Mbps for 480p, 2.5 Mbps for 720p HD, 5 Mbps for 1080p Full HD and 20 Mbps for 4K.
Netflix recommends 3 Mbps for HD, 5 Mbps for Full HD and 15 Mbps for 4K.
Zoom needs 60 to 80 kbps for a voice call, 600 kbps for a good one-to-one video call, and 1.2 Mbps for 720p video.
Keep those figures in mind; everything below follows from them.
512 kbps: the whole working day of a phone
Messages, voice calls on WhatsApp or Telegram, maps and turn-by-turn navigation, booking a ride, paying, email, translating a menu, checking in for a flight, music at normal quality — all of it fits comfortably inside 512 kbps. Web pages load a beat slower; nothing stops working.
That is the idea behind our Basic card: a generous daily amount at full speed for the heavy moments, then up to 512 kbps for the rest of the day — at the lowest price we sell. For a traveller who uses the phone to get around rather than to watch, it is the best value on the shelf for getting around.
1 Mbps: video calls home, and video on a phone screen
At 1 Mbps a one-to-one video call runs smoothly, social feeds load as you scroll, and YouTube plays at 360p and near 480p — the quality most people watch on a phone without ever noticing. It is the point where a plan stops being “enough to get around” and becomes “enough to live on”.
For most travellers this is the sweet spot, and it is our Everyday card: on most destinations, 1 Mbps after the daily full-speed amount, for a small step above Basic.
5 Mbps: Full HD, by the services’ own figures
Five megabits per second is exactly what both YouTube and Netflix name for Full HD 1080p. Which means something quietly radical: a plan that keeps going at up to 5 Mbps after its daily amount is, by those figures, enough for Full HD all evening — the network around you decides the real speed. The speed is the limit — not a pile of gigabytes counting down.
Put a number on it. An hour of Full HD at 5 Mbps is about 2.2 GB. Three hours every evening for a month comes to roughly 200 GB — a figure that would empty any fixed package in days and trip the fair-use limit of some plans sold as “unlimited”.
10 Mbps: headroom
Ten megabits carries Full HD with room to spare, a laptop on hotspot beside the phone, or two people sharing one connection. YouTube publishes no figure for 1440p (“2K”); in practice 10 Mbps is often enough for it, but nobody honest will promise that, because the network around you sets the real speed.
The small print, said out loud
Every speed on every plan, ours included, is “up to”. On a crowded mast, deep inside a building or far from a city, the real speed can be lower — no provider can change the physics. What a stated speed does give you is certainty about the floor you chose: you know before you pay what the plan slows to, and it never quietly drops to a crawl you didn’t agree to.
The bottom line
Choose by what you do, not by fear of running out. Basic for getting around. Everyday for calls home and video on your phone. Extra speed when Full HD or a laptop on hotspot matters. Pay for the speed you need — and stop paying for gigabytes you will never use.