Student accommodation & BTR speed calculator.
Get the total Mbps your tower needs. Sized for residential occupancy patterns, work-from-home, peak streaming, gaming, video calls, based on Liveport telemetry from Australian PBSA and build-to-rent properties.
Adjust the inputs. Number updates live. Numbers are sized to peak, what your residents experience at 8pm on a Sunday.
Sized for 200 beds at 95% occupancy, 3 devices per resident on heavy mix, 30% work-from-home density. Sized to peak (Sunday 8pm).
10.5 Mbps
Effective per-resident bandwidth at peak. Liveport’s per-VLAN architecture means this is what each resident actually gets, not a shared average.
See the PBSA solution
Per-resident VLAN, QR-code onboarding, no front-desk queue at intake. The full Liveport PBSA story.
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Day-one activation, per-apartment networks, resident-direct payments via Stripe/PayPal/card. Yardi-integrated.
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Calculator gives you the carriage size. Site survey gives you AP count, placement, and capacity per floor.
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Sister calculator for hotels and resorts, per-room sizing, 10 to 2,000 rooms.
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Dedicated fibre to the tower (wholesale-grade), NBN, Starlink, SD-WAN bonded.
How this calculator is sized.
Total carriage = (units × occupancy × devices × per-device Mbps × concurrency) + WFH peak load.
Concurrency factor: 0.15 for residential. Higher than hotel (0.10) because residents stream more, game more, and run sustained WFH sessions, but still well under naive “all-devices-active” assumptions because evenings stagger across the tower (gaming kids at 7pm, Netflix at 8pm, late-shift WFH at 10pm). Calibrated against Liveport telemetry: a 1,000-bed PBSA tower at 95% occupancy typically peaks around 10 Gbps.
WFH allowance: 8 Mbps per active WFH user at peak, real Liveport telemetry shows sustained WFH demand averages 6-10 Mbps even with HD video calls, dual-monitor cloud apps and file sync running concurrently. The “25 Mbps per WFH user” benchmark used by some sizing tools is a peak-burst figure, not sustained.
Per-resident allocation is what each resident actually gets at peak under Liveport’s per-VLAN architecture, not a shared-pool average.
Carriage architecture: Liveport runs a wholesale-grade dedicated fibre lead-in directly to the tower as the primary uplink, symmetrical, hard SLA, contended only by your residents. NBN Enterprise or Starlink Business sits behind it as SD-WAN failover so a primary outage is invisible to a 1,000-bed cohort at 8pm.
Calculator is a starting point. A Liveport site survey delivers the actual sizing, AP placement, and per-floor capacity for your specific tower.
Student accommodation / BTR internet, common questions.
How much internet does a 200-bed student accommodation tower need?
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Around 2 Gbps for a 200-bed tower at 95% occupancy with 3 devices per resident on heavy streaming and 30% work-from-home density. Liveport’s calculator gives the exact number for your assumptions.
Why is the per-resident allocation important?
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In a shared SSID model, total carriage is divided across all active devices, so 1 Gbps shared by 200 residents = 5 Mbps each at peak, often less. Liveport’s per-resident VLAN architecture guarantees each resident gets their actual allocation, not a pool average.
How do you size for move-in week?
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Move-in week is the onboarding spike, not the bandwidth spike. Carriage sizing is for ongoing peak (Sunday evening). Move-in week stresses the captive portal and provisioning system, that’s where Liveport’s QR-code onboarding pattern matters more than raw Mbps.
Should BTR residents have their own NBN?
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Possible, but Liveport’s per-apartment service is typically faster, more reliable, and cheaper than residential NBN at scale, and it’s live the moment the lease is signed, not 2-14 days later. Residents can opt out, but most don’t.
What carriage does Liveport recommend for a PBSA or BTR tower?
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Dedicated fibre to the property as the primary uplink. Liveport lays a wholesale-grade fibre lead-in sized to the calculator output, typically 1-2.5 Gbps for towers under 500 beds, 5-10 Gbps for 1,000+. NBN Enterprise or Starlink Business sits behind it as SD-WAN failover. Residential NBN is rarely a sensible primary for shared-tower scale because of contention, asymmetry, and SLA, the residents see the difference at peak hour.
What about gaming and competitive latency?
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Liveport per-resident VLAN means gaming traffic isn’t competing with TV streaming on the same broadcast domain. Latency is determined by the carriage (dedicated fibre: 5-10ms typical, NBN Enterprise: 10-20ms, Starlink Business: 25-40ms) and AP placement (a survey deliverable). Liveport’s default for PBSA/BTR is dedicated fibre primary because residents notice the latency difference on competitive games and high-quality video calls.
Got the number? Now let’s validate it.
A Liveport site survey turns the calculator output into a deployable plan, AP count, placement, carriage mix, three-tier roadmap.