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What’s Slowing Down Your Streaming Speeds?

Source: Pexels

If your WiFi connection is slowing down your streaming speeds, then you’ll know how frustrating this can be. There’s nothing worse than watching an intense scene, only to see a big buffering symbol pop up in the middle of the screen. If you want to stop things like this from happening, you need to get to the root of the interference first.

Connected Users

Your internet connection has a certain amount of bandwidth. You’re sharing this with every connected user in your home. If someone in your house likes to play Temple Tumble, this probably won’t take up much bandwidth. The animations have minimal loading times and the fact that the game is optimized for mobile helps to ensure a quick experience across the board. If you play RPG games, such as Fallout Online, however, then these are huge titles that require a lot of bandwidth, which can push your router to its limits.

Source: Pexels

It’s not just games either. If you have an Alexa then that probably won’t slow down your WiFi, but if you have other Amazon devices, such as a Fire TV stick, then this is capable of using gigabytes of data in just a few hours. It’s not hard to see that if someone’s gaming, while another person watches TV online, this could impact the speeds you’re getting. Upgrading your internet package is the best way for you to work around this, so you can do away with that dreaded buffering symbol once and for all.

Connected Devices

If you have smart bulbs, a WiFi-connected thermostat, and a robot vacuum cleaner then this will be using up huge amounts of data. Most routers aren’t designed to handle a lot of WiFi devices at once. If you have a very old device, consider how many things you have connected to it, and upgrade. You also need to give some thought to your router positioning.

WiFi routers transmit a 2.4 GHz signal. Even though 5GHz is much faster, you shouldn’t just disable your old network. The main reason for this is that 2.4GHz has a way higher level of penetration. It’s not slowed down as much by walls, or solid objects. A quick fix would be for you to position your router so it’s got as much open space around it as possible.

If you’re struggling with slow speeds then you may think that plugging in an ethernet cable is the way to go. This is understandable, as cable is notably faster than WiFi and prone to less interference. With that being said, the cables you’re using could be impacting your speeds. If you have Cat-5 cables then these are the oldest cables used, and they’re only capable of hitting 100 Mbps. Cat-5e however, can support 1,000 Mbps, so it’s worth upgrading to this type of cable if you feel as though your internet speeds aren’t what they could be.

Overall, small things can have a monumental impact on your streaming speeds. With that being said, sometimes a small change is all you need to make to turn things around.

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