Tag: Broadband

Has broadband slowed down during lockdown?

tinsleyNET Admin
Broadband

With furloughed workers and people working from home, the UK residential broadband networks have been put under continued strain for the past 5 weeks and users are starting to feel like their broadband speeds are slowing down.

Why so slow?

Most residential broadband connections are sharing bandwidth between several homes, it’s difficult to find accurate contention ratio data, but a few years back it was typical that residential connections had a contention of 50:1, what that means is that 50 homes could share a single connection to the internet.

Businesses often had 20:1 contention ratios, meaning that each business on the connection could share the bandwidth with up to 19 other businesses.

During normal use, this is not an issue. Through the day the bulk of internet traffic is on the businesses networks, and from 5pm onward the trend swinging to mostly residential connections.

During the lockdown, this trend has obviously changed. Many many more users are vying for bandwidth over the residential connections during the day.

Getting the most out of your internet.

There’s not much you can do in the short term to address the speed of your broadband. Longer term you could look at changing provider or moving to a less contented connection, or one with guaranteed minimum speeds.

But here are some tips to making the most of the speed you’ve got.

Go Lite

Us lite modes on your device or browser or apps that support it.

Some mobile phones and tablets have a Data Saver mode to reduce the amount of data apps can access in the background, Windows 10 has a similar feature under Data Mode.

Set your browser to a lite mode, Chrome, Opera, Firefox and Edge all have data saving modes, designed to reduce and compress the amount of data needed to load a webpage.

While you’re at it, using plugins like The Great Suspender will put tabs that you’re not using into a sleep mode to prevent them automatically refreshing and downloading data in the background.

More and more smartphone and tablet apps now have features to reduce the amount of data needed to work by reducing the quality of graphics, video or sound, or suspending some features while working in a lite mode, check your apps settings for details.

Some apps, like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, can be removed or disabled, and you can use the web based version of the app instead. Most (if not all) of the features you use are available via the web version, all without the background updates.

IoT

Smart home devices like lights, switches, TV’s Security Cameras and personal assistants are everywhere, and most of them will be connected to your WiFi and may be sending and receiving data in the background.

Disconnect them from the WiFi if there is a setting to do that, or turn the power off to them while you’re working to stop them using up you valuable internet speed. Once you’ve finished work, you can turn them back on or reconnect them.

Same goes for any tablets or smartphones you’re not using, set them to airplane mode to disconnect them from the WiFi while you’re working.

Go 4G (or 5G)

If you’ve got a massive or unlimited mobile data allowance, and a reasonable enough signal, use that instead of your home WiFi.

Look for the Mobile Hotspot or WiFi or the Tethering settings in your phone to turn it into a WiFi point you can connect to.

Drop the bitrate

If you’re streaming video, use the streaming apps settings to reduce the bitrate or resolution, it’s easier to watch a smooth playing though slightly less HD movie than it is to watch a 4K movie that stutters and buffers every few minutes.

If you’re in a video conference call, opt to go audio only, if you’re still having issues, see if there’s an option to dial in on the telephone.

tinsleyNET IT Servces Consultants #WeCanHelp

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If you need help making your broadband speeds better, or getting your workforce running securely from home, give us a call toady.

Wi-Fi 6 is coming (did you even notice Wi-Fi 1-5?)

tinsleyNET Admin
WiFi 6 Icon

The Wi-Fi Alliance have released details of Wi-Fi 6 certification program, meaning manufacturers of Wi-Fi devices can start to implement the new standards.

Wi-Fi 6 is the first Wi-Fi standard to use the simpler naming scheme (although this is only on the consumer side, it’s still technically IEE802.11ax)

Previous versions of the Wi-Fi standards are going to be retro-renamed Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) and Wi-Fi 4 (802.11n) to help consumers identify which standard devices are manufactured to.

WiFi 6 Lozenger

What will Wi-Fi 6 give me?

For the average home user, the main benefit will be speed. Wi-Fi 6 will boast speeds upto 9.6Gbps (the existing Wi-Fi 5 801.1ac is rated at a maximum of 3.5Gbps) Obviously it’s extremely unlikely that you’ll ever connect at those speeds, but we expect average connection speeds to be about 30% – 40% better than on a Wi-Fi 5 router. Remember that the average internet speed to homes in the UK is about 54.2Mbps

For busier locations such as businesses, public hotspots and so on, the benefits of Wi-Fi 6 will be much more dramatic. The main aim of Wi-Fi 6 is to increase connectivity and reliability between router and device, amd be more efficient about how it keeps you connected.

Technology designed for multiple device access such as MU-MIMO and OFDMA is included in the specification, meaning more devices can be connected and receive high bandwidth data simultaneously, and more data can be sent in a single burst. As the number of IoT (Internet Of Things) devices in our homes increase, these technologies will help keep your home Wi-Fi ‘clutter free’

Also, the new Wi-Fi 6 standard is designed to be battery efficient, meaning your mobile devices won’t heat up and drain the battery while you stream from a Wi-Fi 6 access point.

Techspot have a great article here listing the technological developments of Wi-Fi 6, including what is meant by MU-MIMO, OFDMA, QAM, OFDM and many more geeky terms!

What if my device is not Wi-Fi 6 compliant, do I need to upgrade?

Nope. As with all Wi-Fi certified devices, backwards compatibility is built in, so if you’re using a phone that’s Wi-Fi 5 compatible (nearly every recent phone will be) and you connect to a Wi-Fi 6 wireless point, the router will recognise your device’s level of compatibility and use Wi-Fi 5 instead. Likewise if your phone is one of the few Wi-Fi 6 compatible phones, it will identify the compatibility of the Wi-Fi access point and use the appropriate settings.

There are already Wi-Fi 6 compatible phones?

Yes, the Samsung Galaxy S10 was the first Wi-Fi 6 phone to hit the market, Apple’s iPhone 11 will also support the standard. To compliment those, routers from cisco, Netgear, Asus and TP-Link have also been released with Wi-Fi 6 compatibility.

Network

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Notwork

Don’t let your network turn into a notwork. With more and more devices using the network to communicate with each other and the outside world, your network is being put under more and more strain. On an unmanaged network, you’ll soon start to see bottlenecks and network slowdown.

Do I use a network?

Yes. Well if you’re reading this on our website then you are.

Long gone are the days when networks were restricted to large companies and universities. In one form or another, and of vastly different sizes, we all use a combination of private and personal networks today. Making those networks efficient is essential to being able to get things done.

tinsleyNET Home Network Services

In your home, the heart of your network is your internet router, from there you might have WiFi or cable connected devices such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, TV’s, heating systems, Games consoles, PC’s, lighting and so on.

In your business it could be a more complicated network setup involving routers, multiple access points and wider connected elements in different buildings or even different countries.

Network of Networks

Getting your network connected safely to the internet is essential for any business, but many people don’t want the hassle of managing the connection and just want the connection to work. We can manage your gateway device and configure it making sure your private network is protected from the public internet.

Your gateway device should be checking all incoming and outgoing data and destinations to make sure nothing untoward is being sent or received by devices on your network.

Servers

Some people want to micro-manage their servers, others just want them to work. We can configure your servers to work for you, how you want. From online hosted servers, to in-house servers, both hardware and virtual. We can design, install and manage the servers you need to get your job done.

IoT

In an ideal world, internet connected devices should just work. You don’t want a new coffee machine to take 4 hours to setup just so you can make a coffee from your smartphone! But this ‘Internet Of Things’ does still need managing. It might be configuring them to connect to your network or securing them if they have remote access facilities.

Sometimes, if a vulnerability is identified after the product has been sold, the manufacturer will release a software patch, but often these are not applied, we can make sure your IoT is kept up-to-date with security patches as required.

tinsleyNET IT Servces Consultants #WeCanHelp

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Whatever size or type of network you have, from your home WiFi and internet connection, to a multi-site MPLS connected company, we can help you manage and protect your data, and streamline your network to make it work better for you.

Everyone in the UK should have access to fast broadband internet by 2020

tinsleyNET Admin
tinsleyNET Getting Online

Broadband for all

David Cameron has pledged that all UK homes and businesses will have access to fast broadband by 2020 backed by a Universal Service Obligation, giving the public the right to request an affordable, fast connection, making internet access a guaranteed service like water and electricity. Read more

Shropshire is going superfast

tinsleyNET Admin
tinsleyNET IT | Getting you online

Rural Broadband

Having lived and worked in Shropshire for most of my life, I am fully aware of the issues of rural connectivity. But that’s changing as part of the the government’s Broadband Delivery UK which aims to have 90% of the UK connected to superfast broadband by next year, and basic broadband access for everyone. Read more