Why is Your Internet Slow?

When thinking about the internet, some days it’s easy to feel like you are trapped in a hamster wheel.

The laptop from three years ago used to sprint from one website to the next, but now it slowed to a crawl. Our devices might not have changed, but how we use them has changed. If you want to breathe some life back into the internet, you might need to look at two important terms–speed and bandwidth.

Speed vs. Bandwidth

Imagine going into a car dealership where a well-spoken salesman walks you to the fastest machine on the lot. That beautiful car can break the sound barrier before you can blink.

You buy the car and imagine it will only take a few seconds to get home. The problem is the four-lane road has shrunk down to just one lane, and a construction worker in an orange vest holds up a stop sign that only allows one lane of traffic at a time. Instead of a few seconds, half an hour ticks by until you pull into your garage.

That’s the difference between speed and bandwidth. You might buy a state-of-the-art laptop. You might buy live streaming security cameras. You might buy a brand new Playstation. All of those technologies are built for speed, but they still need an internet highway that gives them and all the other wifi -enabled devices room to breathe. Speed is how fast a single car (or device) can travel on the highway, and bandwidth is how many lanes are available for all the devices (or cars) to travel at once.

Your internet speed is measured in Mbps (megabits per second). All that means is that it lets you know how quickly information can move between your phone and Facebook, between your laptop and your bank account, or between your television and Netflix.

Five years ago a lot of homes only needed 25 Mbps download speed. But homes today feel differently. Many families purchased smart TVs, signed up for streaming, sat through Zoom office meetings, made an account for Fortnite, and installed some security cameras. Our homes are more connected to the outside world than ever before. With all those devices in mind, a lot of homes find that even 100 Mbps isn’t enough. Every device takes up a lane of traffic, and the more devices you have, the more you need to think about bandwidth and not just speed.