Working and home schooling

For most, our homes were once a sanctuary after a long day at work or school but now our homes have manifested into the office and classroom. Your Internet connection has never been more important and where once you could call your office IT dept if you had an internet connection issue you are now troubleshooting yourself. Working and studying from home can already be difficult but now you are competing with multiple users for a share of the Internet in all areas of your home.

We know that not everyone is tech savvy so we have made some tips to help you continue to get the most out of your Internet connection as you work or study from home.

1. Other users. The bandwidth delivered to your home is shared between all users in the home. Not only PC, laptops, tablets and phones but also TVs and gaming devices…. Try to be aware of which devices are using the Internet and if they are not needed knock them off. This will stop them from consuming important bandwidth in the background such as downloading updates.
2. What applications are in use on your devices? Apps such as Netflix will consume as much bandwidth as it can get to deliver the best picture quality. It is not ideal to have Netflix consuming all your bandwidth as you are trying to make an important Zoom video call. We would advise that when you have a Video call that, if possible, not to run bandwidth hogging apps or to adjust the picture definition to low following these steps on our website. https://www.westnet.ie/how-to-change-streamed-media-definition/
3. Distance from the router is a bigger factor for the speed and quality of the Internet to your devices. The further your device is from the wifi router the worse the speed and quality will be. Your devices will show a WiFi indicator if it is not full strength then you will  not be getting a quality wifi connection. Rooms in the home that were never seen as important for Internet service have now become the office or classroom. The more obstructions such as walls that your wifi signal has to pass through the more diminished the signal will be. We can assist by fitting extra wifi points in your home to boost the wifi coverage. We always recommend that the best method of connection is with a cable from the router, we can also assist with home wiring. Contact us for further information.
4. WIfi interference. Wifi routers work by transmitting a radio signal to your devices, as mentioned above, the better the wifi connection the better the service. Wifi radio signals can be diminished by other wifi devices causing interference to the wifi signal. Usual suspects are baby monitors, video senders and even microwave ovens.
5. Router location-Wifi routers should be located in open spaces and not hidden in cupboards or behind TVs. This will only impede the wifi range.
6. VPNs- Virtual Private Networks are sometimes used to give you a secure connection to your office network. Sometimes there are issues with access to some webpages, due to the workplace security rules, remember VPNs put you on your office LAN so those office firewall rules still apply. Slow speed over VPNs can be a result of your traffic traversing through your office networks and servers. Speed issues may not be your broadband connection but your office network. Check with your work IT department to assist with VPN issues.
7. Video conferencing, Zoom and Teams video conferencing should not be an issue on your Westnet connection as long as your service isn’t subject to some of the issues above, but if you tend to see an issue particularly with group video conferencing, let us know, it may be due to your upload bandwidth and there maybe some tweaks we can make 
8. Speed testing-We always recommend running speed tests with a laptop or PC connected directly to the router, testing over wifi will not give accurate results due to some of the issues raised above.  For more information see https://www.westnet.ie/why-do-i-get-poor-speed-test-results-over-wifi/

Broadband speed can be categorised into two parts, the speed delivered to your router and the speed seen over wifi. The speed delivered to your router is the rate we take into consideration when determining the speed provided to you. We aren’t always able to control how your Internet service behaves beyond the wifi router but we will do whatever we can to optimise it and we hope the tips shared above will assist you in getting the most out of your Internet connection.

We have made a lot of improvements and investments to adjust to the additional usage on our network. To be honest if you are seeing slow speed it is rare that it is actually the connection to your property at fault but if you do think there is an issue with the connection to your property we have no problem with checking this for you.