Working from home during COVID-19 has bring to light the issues we have with the telecommunication and NBN networks. The early days of all of us working from home we were seeing reports daily of systems going down – Teams, Zoom, Email, mobile phone network to name a few. Thankfully that is getting better but how much of the daily issues your facing relates to your home network?
There can be many different bottle necks in your home network that is causing you to drop out of video meetings or not able to access your emails.
Wireless
Most of us these days will connect to our home network via wireless, its a great method but its not always the most reliable. As the name suggests since its a wireless frequency objects and even other wireless devices can impact the quality of your connection.
When choosing a location to place your wireless modem try and find a central location in your home, not close to fridges, microwaves or anything shiny. Wireless modems also work the best when positioned in a high location and not on the floor.
Where possible its always better to use a cable instead of wireless, a cable connection will always provide you with a better and more stable connection.
Types of Connections
Most people think NBN is faster then ADSL2+, not true not all NBN plans are faster then ADSL2+. There are 4 main NBN plans you can get depending on who you go with:
NBN
- 12Mbps Download / 1Mbps Upload.
- 25Mbps Download / 10Mbps Upload.
- 50Mbps Download / 20 Mbps Upload.
- 100Mbps Download / 40 Mbps Upload.
ADSL 2+
- 24Mbps Download / 1Mbps Upload.
The above figures show max speeds so you may not get the full download or upload speed but you can see from the above figures that ADSL 2+ download speeds are almost the same as the 25/10Mb plan so you may not notice much difference other then its more expensive.
When you are wanting to share your internet with other family members who are wanting to stream videos and play games you would need to be looking for at least a 50/20Mb plan.
Equipment
Most people use the supplied modem from their ISP, these are normally included free with your internet, ever wonder why they are free?
As the old saying goes you pay for what you get, these modems are basic, not many different features and limited in what they can handle. Its not uncommon to see a supplied modem have issues where you need to turn it off and back on again for it to work correctly.
As the modems are cheap the hardware that they run on is low end meaning that it cant handle a lot of different tasks. A modern modem has many different roles, modem, router, switch, wireless. The more roles the modem needs to perform the more processing power it requires.
Each environment is unique and has different requirements so if your facing issues with your home network we can attend your home and investigate what underlining bottlenecks you have.