Living in today’s smart technology world, the need for faster internet increases every day. Families with multiple smartphones, tablets and streaming devices may not realize how much bandwidth is needed to support their home. Today’s homes have even more devices utilizing Wi-Fi – such as smart TVs and thermostats, security systems and appliances.
To understand what bandwidth you need, think of cars on a highway. Two lanes might be sufficient for low traffic areas, but as more cars start to use those lanes the end result is congestion and traffic jams that grind you to a halt. That’s how you can think about bandwidth, or internet speed. To keep traffic moving quickly and efficiently, you need more lanes.
So just how much bandwidth do you need in your home to keep your devices running smoothly? Well, that depends. Homes with just a few smart phones or tablets doing basic streaming, web surfing and email are well suited for speeds up to 50 megs. According to industry experts, Internet speeds in the 100–200 Mbps range are ideal for most households since they can handle common uses like streaming and video chat for 2–5 users at once.
If, however, you have special circumstances such as running a home office or you’ve got die-hard gamers in your family, the picture can change with upload capacity for files and reaction time for user actions are particularly important.
Layering on more bandwidth hungry activities such as online gaming or HD Streaming would quickly drive the need for speeds from 100 megs up to 1000 megs, or one gig speeds. Just like cars on the road, the more devices using your network, the more lanes, or bandwidth, you need.
Once you understand your usage, you can more accurately pick a high-speed Internet plan that will serve your family best. Use this formula: divide the number of devices in your household by speed plan, targeting a goal between 25 and 40 Mbps. If there are four people in your household using one device at a time, shoot for an Internet plan of around 100 Mbps to keep up (100/4 = 25). Obviously, you will want to scale up for multiple devices at work at once or some of the applications we’ve discussed that use a lot of data all by themselves
Kinetic has made investments in your area that directly benefit you. Kinetic Internet allows you to receive faster speeds on our fiber-backed network. Faster speeds provide a better experience for things such as smoother movie, music and video streaming; less loading and buffering time; easy and quick access to online content and faster connections when using multiple devices. Take the time to compare and you’ll see why more and more families are turning to Kinetic by Windstream to keep their home networks moving.