Neo 4K: what 4K costs your connection
Neo 4K carries 4K wherever the source does, and a 4K stream is about two and a half times an HD one. What that means for a two-connection house.
Two different ceilings, often confused
There are two quite separate limits on how much television a household can have running at once, and mixing them up produces the most frustrating support threads of all. The first is the connection count on your line: however many you bought, counted at the server, and enforced by refusing to start a stream rather than by showing an error. The second is your own internet connection, which has no idea what you bought and simply runs out of capacity.
They fail differently, which is the useful part. Hitting the slot ceiling produces a channel that sits there and never begins, on one device, while the others carry on perfectly. Hitting the bandwidth ceiling produces streams that start and then stutter, usually on all of them at once, and usually getting worse as the evening goes on.
What each stream actually costs
Reckon on 10 Mbps or so for an HD feed; a 4K one asks for something nearer 25 Mbps. Treat both as planning figures rather than promises - bitrate moves with whatever is on screen, and a fast break costs more than a studio desk - but they are close enough to budget from.
The arithmetic is simply additive. A household running one 4K feed in the living room and one HD feed in a bedroom is asking for something near 35 Mbps before anyone opens a laptop. That is well within an ordinary modern connection and hopeless on an old one, and the difference between those two situations is not something any subscription can change.
Steadiness matters more than the headline number
The commonest mistake after buying is to run a speed test, see a large figure, and conclude the problem must be at our end. But a speed test measures how much data can be moved on average over a few seconds, and streaming does not care about the average - it cares about whether the next second of video arrives before the player has finished the current one.
Jitter and packet loss break that and barely dent the average. This is why a wired screen behaves so much better than a wireless one on the same connection, and why the single most effective thing most households can do is run one cable to whichever screen matters most. Nothing about the line changes; the delivery to it becomes predictable.
Buying slots, knowing this
Count the real evening peak, not the polite version. A set nobody has glanced at since the early news is spending one of your slots just as completely as the screen you chose, and so is the tablet somebody fell asleep beside. Households routinely buy one slot fewer than they need and discover it on a Saturday night.
The slot count is fixed before any money moves and the [terms are all published](/pricing), so the question deserves a minute of thought beforehand. A count that turns out wrong afterwards is put right by writing to us, not by going back to the order form - a second purchase builds a separate line with its own credentials instead of widening the one you already hold.
Common questions
How much bandwidth does one stream need?
Plan on roughly 10 Mbps for an HD stream and around 25 Mbps for a 4K one, and then leave headroom above whatever those add up to rather than sitting exactly on the number. Two 4K feeds running at once therefore want a connection comfortably past 50 Mbps before anything else in the house is considered, which is the arithmetic most households do after the first bad evening rather than before it.
My connection is fast and it still buffers. Why?
Because throughput is not the same measurement as steadiness. Most buffering is jitter and packet loss - brief interruptions in delivery - rather than a shortage of bandwidth, and a speed test averages exactly the thing that is hurting you into a single reassuring figure. It is why running a cable to the main screen fixes more complaints than upgrading the tariff does.
Does watching in 4K use up a connection faster?
No - a slot is a slot, and the line is not metered by volume. Resolution changes how much of your own internet connection each running stream consumes, not how many of them you are allowed. The two limits are separate: the slot count comes from what you bought, and the bandwidth comes from your provider.
Not solved yet?
Quote the NEOA- number from your order, name the screen it failed on, and the reply comes from somebody who can open that line on the Neo panel. Worth trying first: where every channel is listed and none of them will start, move the line onto a mirror address - an edit made on your own device, not here.
Message the team