Archives for January 2023

These Bandwidth Hogs Slow Your Internet (Unless You Have Fiber)

Many internet users experience a sluggish connection even with “high-speed internet.” They’ve invested in a good Wi-Fi router, perhaps a range extender, and may have even upgraded to a faster internet plan.

So why do they find themselves frequently frustrated by slowdowns and freeze-ups? What about their devices—or internet plan—causes this underwhelming performance? And what, if anything, can people do to reduce or even eliminate these issues?

The most likely culprits behind poor internet performance are bandwidth hogs—devices and online activities that gobble up too much bandwidth and slow down everyone’s internet access.

The good news is Northcentral Connect’s advanced fiber network provides exceptionally high download speeds and the much-overlooked bandwidth capacity that only fiber internet can offer. Combined, fiber’s high speeds and excellent bandwidth can end internet sluggishness.

We discuss bandwidth in greater detail below and explain why every internet customer needs to understand it.

Then, we turn to the most common bandwidth hogs in most people’s homes—devices and online activities—and then explain how Connect’s best speed tiers can help resolve any bandwidth issues.

What Is Bandwidth—and Why Is Higher Bandwidth So Important?

Bandwidth can be confusing. Put simply, bandwidth is the amount of information an internet connection can manage per second.

Bandwidth doesn’t measure a particular internet connection’s rate (or speed). Instead, it’s about the volume of online data a connection can “carry” and transfer at any given time.

High bandwidth levels let internet users accomplish activities like streaming TV shows, participating in video calls, playing online games, and posting to social media simultaneously without any slowdowns.

More bandwidth is indispensable for keeping an active online household productive—and happy!

What Exactly Is a Bandwidth Hog?

A bandwidth hog is a colloquial term for a device or online activity that eats up more than its fair share of bandwidth. It hogs too much bandwidth and greedily takes it from other devices or activities. Keep in mind that everyday web browsing typically has little impact on overall bandwidth use.

Some devices are famous bandwidth hogs. So, just by turning on and connecting to a bandwidth hog, a huge amount of available bandwidth on your internet connection will be used.

And certain activities require excess bandwidth to carry out your needs.  So when even one (or more) bandwidth hogs are activated, the dreaded slowdowns and freeze-ups can occur, leading to frustration and anger in your home!

 Common Household Bandwidth Hogs

Smart TVs

Today’s smart TVs feature enhanced technology that displays amazing picture quality.

High-definition, 4K, and 4K Ultra-HD TVs produce stunning imagery and hog lots of bandwidth in the process. Using your smart TV will devour an enormous slice of your home internet’s bandwidth. If you have limited bandwidth capacity, your smart TV could impact other devices and online activities or even slow down a show you want to watch.

Video Streaming

By far the activity with the most excessive use of bandwidth is streaming video.

Netflix tends to be the top offender, in part due to its popularity and vast library of content. Many people stream shows and movies on other devices like their tablets rather than just their smart TVs. And if you have more than one person in your household—and multiple tablets and phones in use—your bandwidth can easily be hogged just by streaming shows and movies.

And Netflix isn’t the only problem.

Streaming services like TikTok and YouTube also use lots of bandwidth. Posting TikTok videos also compounds the bandwidth problem because it involves sending information from the device to a server, consuming even more bandwidth in the process.

Video Calling

During the Covid-19 pandemic, video conference calling became a daily part of life for many people. Zoom, FaceTime, Skype and other services allowed people to stay connected face-to-face, even across long distances. But video calls are notorious bandwidth hogs.

Voice, text, and video all combine to devour bandwidth—and that’s why you’ve experienced those ridiculous freeze-frame faces during the call!

And remember, with video calling, you are not just receiving data—you are also continuously sending it back to the server (and then to your loved ones’ devices). That accounts for video calling’s massive appetite for bandwidth and why so many video calls end up frustrating people (unless you have fiber internet!).

Online Gaming

Another big-time bandwidth hog is online gaming.

Online gaming is incredibly problematic from a bandwidth perspective because, like video calling, information is shared—from the player back to the server and the server back to the player. It often jams the internet connection for gamers and others in the house.

Higher bandwidth allows this excessive volume of data to transfer with far less latency or other delays. So gamers experiencing lag or freezes will benefit from internet plans and tiers that provide more bandwidth.

What’s the Best Way to Get More Bandwidth?

Well, apart from eliminating bandwidth hogs—the devices and activities you already have and love—your best solution is to upgrade to fiber internet.

DSL, cable, and satellite internet don’t have fiber’s high speeds or bandwidth capacity because fiber’s innovative design and cutting-edge materials allow for data to transfer faster and in much higher volumes.

 If you already have fiber internet and would like to improve your internet service, you should increase your plan’s maximum speeds. With fiber internet, you can select a service tier with 1 gigabyte per second (and possibly more, depending on your provider).

A 1 gigabyte per second tier provides plenty of bandwidth to allow a steady flow of online activity like streaming TV and movies, video calling, online gaming, and social media posting. Just by using fiber internet and upgrading your internet speed, you should easily get all the bandwidth your household needs.

To sum it all up, the more bandwidth an internet connection has, the more information it can send out and get back at any particular moment.

And with fiber’s advanced technology and higher speeds, you’ll have additional bandwidth to disburse throughout your home and among your devices. With fiber’s higher bandwidth capacity, your household can avoid the freeze-ups and slowdowns that still plague so many internet users today.

If you have more questions about how fiber internet and its maximum speeds and higher bandwidth can make a difference in your internet connection, feel free to reach out to the helpful experts at Northcentral Connect. And be sure to check out Northcentral Connect’s social pages to learn more about our fiber network!

You’re probably bombarded by lots of advertising trying to persuade you to switch internet providers. And these ads all promise the same thing—fast, reliable internet at a great price.

However, quality internet service has nothing to do with the spiffy corporate logos and glossy images of smiling faces in marketing materials. At its most fundamental level, the speed and reliability of your internet is based on the kind of technology and quality of materials used to deliver internet into your home.

The most common internet services available today are DSL, coax cable, wireless, satellite, and fiber optic. Though some of these technologies have been around for a long time, they are not created equal.

Given the number of choices, deciding which service is right for you can get confusing. At Northcentral Connect, we take pride in helping our community grow with our powerful fiber network. And we’d like to explain in more detail why fiber internet is the best choice for your home or business.

 Fiber Internet: What It Is, How It Works, and Why It’s the Best Internet Option Out There

Before we compare and contrast fiber to its competitors, we’d like to describe what it is and its advantages in more detail. There are three primary reasons why fiber stands heads and shoulders above the rest: outstanding download speeds, upload speeds, and bandwidth.

 Fiber’s Superior Download Speeds

Fiber is shorthand for “fiber optic” internet. Utilizing fiber optic cable, which consists of hundreds of tightly compacted thin glass strands or “hairs,” fiber internet technology has an enormous capacity to transfer online data. Fiber internet converts internet data—your emails, photos, videos, messages, and everything else you send and receive online—into data packets.

These tiny packets of data are transmitted to your devices through light pulses along fiber’s glass strands. Fiber internet literally transfers online data at the speed of light! This means that fiber’s maximum download speeds can easily hit and exceed 1 gigabyte per second. And fiber’s top download speeds continue to increase as its technology improves.

Fiber’s Exceptional Upload Capabilities

While most people look at download speeds when assessing internet quality, savvy internet customers know to consider upload speeds as well.

Upload speeds refer to the rate at which your devices send data back to other people and servers. High upload speeds are crucial for stable video conferencing and calls (like Zoom or FaceTime), posting on social media (especially for online videos like on TikTok), and online gaming.

Because of its cutting-edge material composition and sophisticated system design, fiber internet has a great capacity to download and upload data in equivalent measures.

Techy folks call this “symmetrical internet,”—and no other technology currently has fiber’s ability to deliver it so well. Fiber’s technology provides equally fast download and upload speeds through its outstanding symmetrical internet capability.

Fiber’s Massive Bandwidth Capacity

Last but certainly not least, fiber internet has far greater bandwidth capacity than other forms of internet.

Bandwidth is often confused with speed, so let us clarify: bandwidth is the quantity of data and information an internet connection can handle over a specific time (usually per second). Higher bandwidth is critical in households with multiple devices—and for families that like to stream movies, regularly post and view online videos, and enjoy online gaming.

Because of more bandwidth, fiber internet providers typically have no data caps, so you won’t have to worry about end-of-month slowdowns.

ISPs employing older technology (like the kinds discussed below) are far more likely to have plans that sneak data caps into their services. With fiber and its vast bandwidth capacity, you seldom have to worry about data caps hindering your internet!

 Fiber’s Rivals Just Can’t Keep Up

Fiber transmits data faster and more reliably than other internet options that rely on older infrastructure and materials designed for other purposes like telephone or television. That makes fiber a faster and more dependable internet service for your home.

While the other options on this list may have fast download speeds—or even claim to match some of fiber’s speeds—no other current technology has either the upload speed or bandwidth capacity of fiber. 

Below are the four main alternatives to fiber internet available today. We briefly describe them—and explain why they fall short of fiber’s outstanding capabilities.

DSL

DSL, short for “Digital Subscriber Line,” is one of the earliest forms of “high-speed” internet.

Built on the copper wiring used for landline telephone service for decades, it can achieve maximum download speeds of around 100 megabytes per second—or about 10% of fiber’s typical 1 gigabyte per second rate.

DSL is still found in many small towns and rural areas that don’t have access to fiber. But since DSL’s maximum speeds are just a tenth of fiber’s, DSL doesn’t even come close to matching fiber.

Coax (Cable)

Next, we turn to the most common alternative to fiber available today: cable.

Short for coaxial cable, “coax” uses copper-based wires to transmit internet signals. While cable is an improvement over DSL, it uses a technology created to send television signals, not internet data. Consequently, cable’s copper wiring doesn’t have the “capacity” to transmit data nearly as well as fiber, especially regarding uploading and upload speeds.

And fiber’s speeds are just astounding, up to 10-to-20 times faster than cable. Cable’s copper wiring just can’t keep up with fiber. So when you add in cable’s relatively poor bandwidth capabilities, it’s clear that fiber internet leaves cable in the dust!

Wireless Broadband (or Fixed Wireless Internet)

Another internet option is wireless broadband. The name can be confusing, as WiFi provides your own home with “wireless” internet, but in this case, wireless internet offers service to customers through cell phone towers with 4G and 5G signals.

Because cell phone towers are increasingly common in areas without other telecommunication or cable infrastructure, they may be a good option for people living in remote areas.

 However, wireless internet cannot compete with the high speeds delivered by fiber and here’s why.

Your home or business’s distance from the wireless cell phone tower will impact the speed and stability of your internet—and probably leave you frustrated. In addition, wireless broadband’s signal is easily obstructed by other buildings and structures or affected by the weather and other environmental impacts.

Due to fiber’s “hard-wiring,” those obstructions simply don’t apply, letting fiber’s light-speed data transmission deliver outstanding service. 

Starlink

 Starlink, a relatively new company, owned by SpaceX, provides satellite internet to remote areas, including many rural areas in the United States.

Starlink’s low-orbit space satellites provide faster speed capabilities than other satellite internet technology. But Starlink is still hampered by the same quality and consistency problems that plague all satellite internet options, including weather interference and other atmospheric factors.

While Starlink may improve previous kinds of satellite internet, it just can’t provide as reliable a signal as fiber’s advanced “hard-wired” infrastructure and technology regularly does.

Other Factors to Consider

So what, if any, are the downsides of fiber internet? Well, the biggest downside to fiber is that it’s not available everywhere. The good news is that more and more communities are accessing fiber, including rural and smaller communities.

Another consideration is that fiber’s highest download speeds per second—usually a gigabyte per second—can be pricey, meaning some people may not as easily afford to max out on fiber’s outstanding benefits. But even fiber’s more modest speeds are still faster and more reliable than the other forms of service currently available, making any fiber internet plan an excellent value.

As you can see from the above comparisons, fiber clearly delivers superior internet at greater speeds and with more consistent reliability than any other option. It’s the best choice for high-speed internet on the market today.

If you have other questions about fiber internet and how it can help make you more productive, the friendly support team at Northcentral Connect is available to help. And be sure to follow Northcentral Connect’s social pages to learn more about our fiber network!