Optimising your home network

Is outdated technology frustrating your work-from-home experience, or handicapping your home-based business? Bill Bennett explains what you need to do.

Ultrafast broadband proved its worth in 2020. As the nation went into various levels of lockdown our broadband network kept us all working. Video calling meant we stayed in touch at a time when physical meetings weren’t possible. Reliable broadband meant retailers could continue to sell. After hours, it kept us entertained with streamed television, movies and online gaming.

New Zealand would have had quite a different lockdown if the Covid-19 pandemic had struck a few years earlier. We had a lucky break. In 2019 the ISPs (Internet service providers) and network companies brought forward upgrades to prepare for the Rugby World Cup. Spark streamed the cup online for the first time. That upgrade meant there was plenty of headroom when everyone went home, and demand ramped up.

Fibre was the star performer. Fixed wireless broadband customers had a mixed experience. Some fixed wireless users saw fibre-like speeds. In other cases, it did little better than the old copper network. The unluckiest users were those in places the fibre network doesn’t reach and where wireless is poor. Some of these people turned back to copper. Sometimes the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t.

There’s no question fibre is the best technology for moving broadband around the nation. It’s faster and more reliable than any alternative. Prices are competitive. If you shop around, you can get a 100 Mbps plan with unlimited download for around $80 a month. There are cheaper deals, but they tend to come with strings attached.

A 100 Mbps fibre plan is the best choice for most homes and small offices. There’s enough bandwidth for two or three people to take part in videoconferences and still plenty left for web browsing and other activity. If more than three people share a connection, you live with teenagers, or your applications are demanding then it is worth paying extra for an unlimited gigabit plan.

A gigabit plan costs around $100 a month. Again, there are deals.
The main advantage of unlimited gigabit plans is that you never worry whether there’s enough broadband. You can do anything online without experiencing restraints.

At the time of writing (December) New Zealand’s fibre network reaches about 85 percent of homes and a higher number of businesses. By the end of 2022 it will cover 87 percent. Fixed wireless will reach almost everyone else. A small number of people, less than one percent, may have to use satellite.
For years the bottleneck between home PCs and the Internet was the connection to your home. There is a chain of connections and that was the weakest link. For fixed line broadband the weakest link was the copper line to the roadside cabinets. For wireless it was the connection to the nearest cell tower.
Now fixed line fibre and 5G mobile mean the weakest link in that chain is usually inside the home or office.

Setting up your network
In most homes and offices Wi-Fi moves data between devices and the point where the broadband connection enters the building. Wi-Fi is a great technology, it means your devices are not tied down. But it may not give your device the fastest broadband connection.

When you have fibre, contractors install a box called an ONT, or optical network terminal, at the point the fibre network enters your home. Most of the time this connects to a second box called a router. The router distributes data around your house and ISPs often send you a wireless router when you sign up.
Routers don’t always include wireless, but all New Zealand ISP routers have built-in Wi-Fi.
Wireless routers often have four Ethernet ports on the back. These are sockets that can take a network cable and you can connect devices like TVs or PCs direct to these ports.

It’s a good idea to connect your home television and, if you have one, the TV set-top box, using an Ethernet cable. Ethernet is faster than wireless and more reliable. What’s more, you get a direct point-to-point connection. It isn’t shared.
In contrast every Wi-Fi device shares the same connection. This means wireless can get congested and that makes for a poor streaming TV experience. When people complained about getting bad pictures during the Rugby World Cup held in Japan, wireless was often the problem.

The same applies if you have shared backup storage or a server on your home network. It will do much better with an Ethernet connection than with Wi-Fi.
You can run Ethernet cables around your house so that PCs, printers and so on all get the best possible connections. This is expensive and disruptive. But can be worth the trouble if you need speed or reliability.

A faster Wi-Fi
There is now a better wireless option, although you may not see all the benefit for a while yet. Wi-Fi 6 is the latest standard of the wireless network technology. It is faster than older versions, but that’s only half the story – Wi-Fi 6’s designers built it to cope when many devices connect at the same time.

The average home has around 20 Internet connected devices. Switched on devices will attempt to communicate with your router all the time. When lots of people use the same Wi-Fi router at the same time, everything slows down. You might have a gigabit connection to your house, but with an old Wi-Fi wireless router your device might only see speeds one tenth of that.

There is a catch with Wi-Fi 6. You’ll need to buy a new wireless router; most ISP routers use the old standard. Expect to pay around $300 or so for the privilege. At the same time, you may have to update your devices. You can install a Wi-Fi 6 card in a desktop computer, but laptops and phone makers only started using Wi-Fi 6 about 18 months ago. And even then, not every new phone or laptop has the technology.

This is a long term switchover. If you are about to upgrade your PCs or phones, check any new devices have Wi-Fi 6. You’ll notice the speed difference straight away.  

Bill Bennett is an Auckland-based business IT writer and commentator. Email [email protected]