Broadband Speedtest

Intend to study at home?

Your experience with some of our services may be less efficient with a poor connection.
Both UHI and the ServiceDesk are unable to provide any assistance or support in improving your home network, be it broadband or mobile data, other than to help you check the speed. You will need to speak to your Internet Service Provider if you require assistance with this.

Note: to get accurate results make sure you're not using your internet connection for anything else while the test runs.

Here you can check your connection speed.
You should run this test with no other devices connected to your broadband, as these will all affect the capacity and speed of your connection. These include items such as Mobile Phones, other Laptops and computers, Dash Buttons, Smart speakers, Sky, Smart TV, Streaming services and Games Consoles.

You will be provided with 2 figures from this test, a download Speed and an upload speed.

You should have a minimum 2MB download speed and 2MB upload speed, which would class as a standard quality connection for accessing UHI services. If your speeds are less than this, there is a high chance that the quality of the video conference connections will be poor, resulting in lost video and broken up audio.

(As a comparison, BBC iPlayer recommended 1.5MB for a standard definition or 5MB for a high definition connection for playback of content)

If your broadband at home has a lot of other devices connected at the same time and / or your speed check provides you with numbers that are less that what we recommend, you should speak to your broadband provider to see if you can upgrade your connection.

You may not have home broadband and instead rely on 4G routers or mobile data connections through your mobile phone (tethering) – You should follow the same guidelines on speedchecks as above and also check your data allowance is sufficient for your intended use, as video content can use up a lot of data.