What Pulls the Most WiFi?
The use of Wireless Fidelity commonly known as WiFi is now a necessity in our daily lives. Starting with smartphones, and laptops, and ending with smart home devices – nearly every piece of technology we use now has WiFi built-in and uses it for internet connectivity and other things. However, today, thanks to the Internet of Things, there are likely several devices connected to your home’s network, and if the router cannot handle the traffic and coverage, you might experience congestion, dead zones, or slow connection. Well, which devices consume the most WiFi signal in your house or apartment? Below, you’ll find a list of the culprits that consume the most bandwidth and a list of tips to ensure your router can keep up with the demand.
Streaming Media Devices
Devices that use your home WiFi the most are smart TVs and video game consoles, streaming sticks, and boxes including Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV, and Chromecast. These devices are always downloading huge volumes of data from the internet to air programs, movies, music, and games as per people’s demand.
Watching one hour of 4K video on the internet may consume up to 7 GB of data. And indeed if many members of a family are streaming UHD movies at the same time soon the amount of bandwidth required reaches impressive figures. Other electronic equipment such as the Xbox Play station also requires an online connection for game downloads, system updates, downloading games, and online gaming which can strain the network.
That means the more streaming and gaming simultaneously in the home occur the more these devices are likely to slow down, buffer, or have a decrease in video quality. Some of the ways through which congestion can be eliminated include, purchasing a new high-bandwidth router, diminishing the number of devices connected, or placing the devices nearer to the router.
Computers and Laptops
Our computers and laptops can be WiFi-thirsty or hungry machines at times even if we are not aware of it. Even browsing tabs, and multiple applications that may be running concurrently also count towards the WiFi usage. From video calls to downloading/uploading large files, syncing content to the cloud, or even connecting remotely to offices, these are activities that can easily become bandwidth-intensive over WiFi.
Gaming PCs, as one might expect, place even more demands on the networks. Graphic designing software, video editing tools, virtual private network connections, and OS updates are other forms of computer usage that consume a lot of WiFi. The amount of internet speed used depends on the combination of devices and the nature of tasks that are to be carried out. An AC1200 router is unlikely to handle a multiple-computer household as it may start lagging.
Smartphones and Tablets
It is not a surprising fact that smartphones and tablets use a lot of WiFi given how much time most of us spend on our mobile devices every day: streaming videos, playing games, talking with friends and family members, browsing the internet, and much more. All such regular non-violent background operations as syncing data to the cloud, updating applications, and sending messages and notifications gradually consume WiFi.
When one owns multiple devices and is living in a household together with family, it is possible to rack up a considerable amount of usage collectively. Some of the social media apps require frequent update procedures and the data must be pulled all the time. Mobile data usage is also significant, especially with streaming music services such as Spotify and Pandora.
The larger the number of devices connected at once or if the device is not portable and is located in a certain area of ?? the house the probability of WiFi being available at a lower level increases. Including the mesh routers from the AC3000-AC4000 class ensures that they offer well-established coverage throughout the house for managing traffic at peak times.
Smart Home Devices
Our home networks no longer consist solely of phones and computers. Smart-home devices — which include video doorbells and cameras, alarm systems, thermostats, lights and switches, locks, appliances, and many others that use the internet connection — are connected with WiFi systems. Collectively these IoT gadgets do not consume a lot of bandwidth, each device is relatively small in terms of its data consumption. Yet when used on a larger scale around the home, the coalescence of collective usage accrues.
That is, while the amount of task types has increased, the load on the devices has not necessarily gone up in the same proportion. Watching multiple video streams from security cameras requires more Wi-Fi than a smart thermostat calling the server from time to time to ask for the current temperature. Camera footage downloads and system updates are the other events that increase usage, although in large amounts only for a short period.
However, one smart bulb is still just one smart bulb; several smart bulbs are a different story because you will always need more once you have 50 or more connected devices. Mesh routers deal with larger areas whereas, Tri-band is an additional 5 GHz channel to avoid congestion on smart home traffic.
Network Storage Devices
Network-attached storage (NAS) devices are storage systems that can be connected to home networks and contain important photos, videos, music, documents, and media collections for the family. When connected to WiFi then media can be shared wirelessly around the home environment. The tradeoff is that huge files get transferred constantly which pulls heavily on your router. As a result, the MacBook Pro is more of a portable desktop than a mobile machine.
It becomes even worse when multiple users are reading or writing on the NAS at the same time, while also downloading movies and other bandwidth-demanding exercises. It means that large files will take greater proportions of a network’s priority, effectively degrading routers’ interactivity. The same is done when NAS units are moved to wired Ethernet connections to free up wireless networks – but this is not always as convenient.
Using better MU-MIMO routers with a good QoS ensures traffic is correctly prioritized. By integrating better processors and extra 5 GHz radios, it is possible to eliminate bottlenecks by load-shifting across bands and spatial streams. Increased RAM benefits concurrent clientele connections for steady throughput of NAS.
In Conclusion
The devices that are seen to consume most of the home WiFi are all those falling in the streaming media, large files downloading, gaming access, video feeds, and constant cloud backup. Administering today’s smart homes is a matter of ensuring that home networks have sufficient bandwidth capacity and coverage to avoid network saturation during their peak utilization. This means that instead of crowding the WiFi, we should buy better AC2200+ dual or tri-band routers, increase internet speeds, limit the number of devices connected to it, or even wire where possible to keep WiFi running smoothly while leading our busy connected lives.
Ready to upgrade your internet experience? Call us now at +1 844-349-7575 to explore the best Cox Internet plans for your needs!