Home Bandwidth

Part of this purpose of this blog is to educate regular people about frustrating issues with technology and how to solve them.   One of the newest issues facing The Middle (middle income, middle aged, potentially middle America) is lack of bandwidth at home.   Is this really an issue or is there another culprit?

The average US Internet bandwidth as measured by Akamai was 11.7 Mbps.  That is well below the FCC definition of 25 Mbps for a broadband household.  I believe most of this is caused by monopolistic providers (Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner) that have no financial incentive to increase.  I live in Austin, Texas and as soon as Google Fiber announced they were going to build in Austin, my Time Warner speed jumped to 300 Mbps download and 25 Mbps Upload at no additional charge.  Therefore the first thing to do is complain to the local governing body that regulates the service and to the providers themselves.   Work with your local neighborhood group or association to try to bring a new provider into your area.  However, I do not believe that bandwidth to the provider is the sole issue with home bandwidth.

To me the number one issue with home bandwidth is your wireless router.  Most people that I know use either the stock router that comes with the service provider or uses a cheap Linksys or Netgear that they've had for a number of years.  Over the last five years the technology in home wireless has improved dramatically coupled with the new demands on that same wireless.

Let's start with what's going on in your home.   You have traditional devices like desktop and laptop computers.  Next you have phones and tablets and then smart TV's and video game consoles.  Now you are getting smart appliances like thermostats and cars.   I have a wife and two teenage daughters and I counted around 50 devices on my home wireless and any one given time.  I would say the average home probably has been 10 and 20 on the home Wi-Fi.   This is only going to get worse as cellular carriers make it punitive to exceed your data cap and every new device such as refrigerators and washer and dryers are going to connect to your home network.   This is called the Internet of Things (IoT) that you've seen now in TV commercials.

The two biggest hogs in your house are TV's with Netflix/Hulu/Amazon Prime and video game consoles such as Xbox and Playstation.  It's one thing to use the bandwidth but there is no buffering especially with video games.  This means that any interruption in the wireless signal causes issues with the consumption of content.  Paused movies and dropped video games.

On the technology front most wireless devices work in the 2.4 GHz spectrum.  This includes all the above mentioned devices as well as things such as cordless phones and remote control vehicles.   The 2.4 GHz spectrum has a fairly long range and is an open spectrum for use.  Even though traffic is filtered and secure there is a lot of chatter on this spectrum especially if you live in a dense area like a tight urban neighborhood or apartment building.   This is like trying to find someone shining a flashlight in the dark.  Easy to pick out if there are no other flashlights, but if there are hundreds of lights it takes some time to find the correct one.

The 5 Ghz spectrum is relatively new and has a shorter range than 2.4 GHz, however it can handle the new 802.11ac protocol and can handle a lot more bandwidth.  The 5 GHz is much less crowded than 2.4 GHz and applications fly when connected.   The key is to get a router than can support both 2.4 and 5 GHz and support guest network and have security features built in.  

I recommend a mid price option such as this Asus from Amazon ( https://www.amazon.com/RT-AC66U-Dual-Band-Wireless-AC1750-Gigabit-Router/dp/B008ABOJKS/ref=sr_1_3?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1471368504&sr=1-3&keywords=Asus+router ) .  There are many others but you need to compare features, processor, etc.  These routers can get very expensive and if you are not a high end gamer then a mid-price one should be just fine.  You might want to just use the one that came from the cable company and that's fine, just be prepared for buffering and dropped games.