Summary: Victor asked: All these Internet connected things for the house (Echo, doorbells, thermostats, etc.) How much bandwidth do they use? Do they slow your Internet down do it’s difficult to watch a streaming video?<br> <br> That’s a good question, Victor. It depends on the device. Things that send video across your network, like the Ring video doorbell, will use a good bit of bandwidth, but only when they’re active. How often does someone ring your doorbell when you’re in the middle of streaming something on Netflix?<br> Other network connected devices, like Amazon’s Echo or the Nest thermostat, don’t use very much bandwidth at all. Even if you were to ask Echo to stream some music, that doesn’t demand a lot of bandwidth.<br> <br> <br> <br> <br> Video is the bandwidth killer<br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> Video is the bandwidth killer, HD video is worse, and 4K video is the biggest problem of all. If you hope to stream 4K video in the future without buffering or degraded picture quality, you’d better plan on having something quite a few notches up from the basic Internet plan.<br> How far up? 15 megabits per second is the minimum for streaming 4K, but the truth is that you need a lot more. Closer to 50 megabits per second, if you hope to have people do anything else with the Internet at the same time you want to stream a movie.<br> So, as long as your Internet connected devices are not moving video around, you’re probably okay. But it’s also true that there is no such thing as “too much Internet speed.”<br>
