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Best WiFi for Home Use: 3 Use Cases

Do you have the best WiFi for your home’s needs? Here’s a look at 3 use cases: work from home, streaming & gaming to help you find out what you really need.

Do you have the best monthly WiFi to suit your needs? When it comes to WiFi, it’s important to know that one speed does not fit all. If you’re not sure exactly what you need, you could be paying a higher price tag for unnecessarily high speeds. Alternatively, there might be better home WiFi deals from other service providers to suit your needs, especially for those who use high bandwidth for activities such as gaming and streaming.

Understanding your usage will help ensure you get the wireless Internet connection that’s right for you. Here we outline three different usage scenarios that might lead you to choose different WiFi options offered by providers near you.


Working From Home

More and more of us are working remotely these days. And that trend is likely to continue into the foreseeable future. Perhaps you started working remotely at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and decided not to make any changes to your wireless home WiFi system, thinking you would be back to the office in no time. For those who will be working from home for the long-haul, if you’ve ever experienced the frustration of getting booted out of a Zoom call due to a poor connection, there might be better options for you.


Considering Your Work From Home Needs

Your optimal work from home setup will depend on how many people in your household are using WiFi at one time, as well as how you use the Internet for your work. If you only have one user throughout the day and you simply use your computer for checking email and typing up documents, then you might be able to opt for something quick, easy, and affordable. Several broadband providers offer great home WiFi offers for 50 Mbps starting at or below $50/month, which is great for light Internet usage. Some good providers to look into would be Suddenlink, Xtream and Xfinity.

Now, if you’re constantly tuning in through virtual meetings, downloading and uploading large files, and using several cloud applications, you’re going to be using more bandwidth. This is especially true if more than one person in your household works from home. If you also have children in your house, once they get home from school and start streaming their favorite shows, you might notice some glitches in your Internet connection near the end of your work day. Opting for a higher speed—at least 100 Mbps—might prevent these frustrations from happening.

It’s also not a bad idea to figure out where to place your router for faster home WiFi to ensure you have the best connectivity possible throughout your work day.


Video Streaming

You will need a good Internet connection for streaming video, especially if you’re streaming 4K video. Two of the most important factors to consider when shopping for options with different service providers are download speed and reliability.

If you only have one or two televisions or other devices in your house playing video at a time, then you might be able to keep a lower speed without sacrificing picture quality. If you have more devices, however, you’ll want to shop for higher speed Internet plans.

It’s important to remember that not all connections are equally reliable. A sudden loss in Internet speed can cause a loss of video quality or your favorite TV show to pause just as things were getting good.

Sometimes this loss of speed is due to increased network traffic or other factors. Having a fiber connection can prevent this. You can also look at customer reviews for different service providers ahead of time to get a feel for reliability and also how often the service is interrupted for things like service outages.


Gaming

Do you have a hardcore gamer in your house? For serious gamers, a lag of even just a second can be a serious point of frustration and even cause them to lose a game and ruin their hard-won reputation. Finding the fastest download and upload speeds and choosing a provider with the lowest latency in your area is key. You won’t necessarily need to opt for 1 Gig speeds just for gaming, but gamers will want to opt for higher speeds, starting at at least 100 Mbps. Of course, if others in your household are also using the Internet at the same time, 100 Mbps may not be fast enough.

If you have someone in your household who plays games often, and you also have other family members working from home or streaming video all at the same time, then opting for 1 Gig speed might be the best way to ensure everyone is happy and stays connected on their devices.

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