How Much Internet Speed Does Your Smart Home Need?

How Much Internet Speed Does Your Smart Home Need?

Smart devices bring a new level of enjoyment, convenience, and security to your house. The most important thing that keeps your smart home working is your home network. If you add lots of smart devices to your home network without keeping in view the bandwidth they use could lead to a slow connection that makes all smart devices pretty dull. 

A smart home can be kept vibrant and alive by ensuring the right internet speed that can handle everything on the network. Luckily, many smart home devices don’t use much bandwidth. Let's learn about types of smart home devices, how much internet speeds your smart home need, which devices use the most bandwidth, and how to get most of your network so that you can enjoy the benefits of smart technology. 

Types of Smart Home Devices

Several types of smart home devices can be added to a rental without any need for major change. Light bulbs can be easily switched; smart speakers are easy to set up. However, you may need to get approval from the landlord for devices like thermostats and cameras.

Given below are the most well-known smart home devices to add to your home:

•          Smart Lights
•          Door locks
•          Video doorbells
•          Cameras
•          Smoke detectors
•          Thermostats
•          Smart speakers 
•          Digital assistants

Smart home devices that require fast internet speeds

If you don’t have a high-speed internet connection, you are still lucky when it comes to having your smart devices work without interruptions. In simple words, smart home devices use a little bandwidth to deliver guidelines to devices such as smart locks, or smart lights as it is just a small part of data delivered across the network. On the other hand, some smart home devices certainly require a good portion of bandwidth and high-speed internet so that they can work properly. Such devices include anything having a camera.

Video doorbells and WiFi cameras are becoming the popular smart home devices on the market as they are very useful devices for any home. Such camera-equipped devices need a good chunk of bandwidth where any internet connection will not work. For instance, the Nest Cam IQ can use the upload bandwidth of 4 Mbps. If your home network has a speed much higher than that, you don’t have to worry about this. However, if you have a slow speed of like 7 Mbps, the Nest Cam IQ can use most of this bandwidth, causing slowdowns in other areas of your network.

Fortunately, the WiFi cameras and other smart cameras are able to record video at a low quality if you have a slow internet connection. For example, a standard Nest Cam can record at a minimum resolution of 360p, which is not a good one but only use 0.15 Mbps of your network.

How much internet speed do you need?

Here is a very commonly asked question: How much internet speed do you really need? Or what type of effect will you have on your smart home network when you add all the smart home devices to the network? The answer is, for most of the devices, the effect is not significant. Many smart home devices work well on average internet speed and don’t require a very fast connection. Smart lights and smart thermostats just need to have access to the internet to get commands from the control panel or smartphone, thus there is not too much data transfer happening.

But there are devices with cameras that require fast internet speed to perform well. If you have a couple of devices with cameras, they will eat up a large amount of bandwidth and leaving no bandwidth for other devices. Even without cameras, you also have to consider the number of devices operating at a single time in your house, including computers and smartphones. Though smart home devices without cameras don’t use a lot of bandwidth individually, together they can use too much of your internet and slow down other devices such as a smart TV.

As a general rule of thumb, for every 10 to 12 smart devices, add around 5 Mbps to your internet plan and another 5 Mbps if you want to install cameras. It will give you the right starting point and you can do adjustments. 

Save bandwidth without upgrading the internet package

You can save bandwidth even without making any changes to the internet package. You can adjust your settings but these might not be of your choice. For instance, change in resolution on your cameras which give rise to low-quality videos and small output files that are easy to upload and download. If you lower the resolution of cameras, you will not need to upgrade your internet package or require a high-speed internet connection. Changing the resolution of the camera from 1080p to 720p is a great choice particularly if you have limited data on your internet plans. 

What about upload speed

For smart home devices to work properly, upload speed doesn’t matter much. To perform at their best, smart devices require a very minimum upload speed. If you have an upload speed of 3 Mbps, you don’t have to worry about the performance of smart devices in your home.

Get the most out of your connection

You can reduce the usage of the internet of your smart home devices by turning down the quantity of data they use. Cameras can be set to lower resolution so that they record videos at low resolution and generate small files. It can make a huge impact. Other smart home devices sometimes have settings to adjust how frequently they use the internet. 

If you are willing to compromise on the usage of your smart home devices, you can call your internet service provider and try to find a deal with faster internet. ISPs sometimes have discounted deals or specials offers available that usually are not advertised, but if you ask by calling you might be surprised. 

Whether you want to add a few Echo smart devices to your home or want to change your rental into an entirely connected home of the future, you have got adequate options. It is never been easier with increasing internet speeds and low requirements of smart devices.