Sky Broadband - Overloaded with multiple device usage?

[MummyBtothree]

We have sky broadband and since our two sons have got a tablet each we have noticed it seems to be draining our internet and none of us can get a signal if more than two of us are using devices at the same time. Im completely clueless with this stuff, what are we doing wrong or what do we need? Thanks in advance

What strength of broadband do you have (eg maximum upload and download speeds) ? If you have ordinary broadband and your sons are eg playing games on their tablets - as most lads seem to do - then it's perfectly possible that their tablet usage could be 'using up' all the available capacity. (It can depend on where you use it in your house/time of day as well.)

What do you mean by "draining our internet"?

Tablets will connect via WiFi. WiFi is slow compared to direct cable connection, so the bottleneck in your system may be the WiFi rather than the speed of your internet connection.

It could also be that your internet connection is not sufficient for the amount of data being transferred.

It can be very hard to know what it is exactly that is causing any problems but I tend to suspect WiFi initially.

Do you use any desktop or laptop computers, or TV Streaming devices (SkyBox for example) which stay in the same place most of the time? Using Ethernet cable may help give those a better connection to the router than by using WiFi.

Powerline kits can help with wiring Ethernet cables by using existing home power cables to transmit the data.

Hellfire thats complete gobbledegook to me! lol. We have a sky router in the lounge which shows up a very strong signal if that helps!

The way I think wifi works is like this:

Imagine you have 4 people, 3 stood in a circle around the 4th.
The one in the middle represents the wifi router.
No.4 holds a tennis ball, this represents data.
No.4 throws the ball to No.1, who throws it back to No.4
No.4 throws the ball to No.2, who throws it back to No.4
No.4 throws the ball to No.3, who throws it back to No.4
Repeat that cycle.

Now imagine that No.3 is connected direct to No.4
No.4 throws tennis to No.3, who throws it back to No.4
Repeat that cycle.

Cable connection is faster and not shared with others.

Tablets can not be linked to cables but your skybox can be. Desktop and laptop computers can be as well. So where a device does not need to be mobile, give it a cable if possible.

The powerline thing Nannynick mentions is a way to avoid having cables being drilled through walls. You just need a power socket near your router and a power socket near your skybox, then you have a cable from skybox to the special box which fits the power socket, same with the router end.

If your sons are watching movies, then that will download a lot of data and other devices will experience delays. Experiment a bit with how many devices can watch movies at the same time.

We dont download movies, the boys mainly play games on their tablets and we are just surfing the net on phones or tablets.

We have a sky router and always at least 4 devices on the go, often more so I don't think that's your problem.
I do try to use ethernet instead of wi fi where possible but phones, ipads and laptop all use wi fi.
What can cause a bottleneck due to our broadband speed is uploading. Are you uploading a lot of photos to cloud?

Not loading photos up eithet. All I can think is that we have recently downloaded (or uploaded, wouldn't know the difference) a sky box set, the walking dead seasons 1-4 would that affect it???

Yes, I would assume such a download would come via the internet connection and would be very large. So that would slow down everything else.

Has the SkyBox confirmed it has finished downloading things? Not sure how those boxes work but I suspect it says somewhere if something is downloading or not - in the Planner perhaps?

See how things go once the SkyBox has finished downloading stuff.

The sky box finished downloading it about a week ago.

A) Do, please, go to www.speedtest.net, at intervals when tablets are and are not being used, and then (if possible) directly connect a laptop to the router and try it again. Let us know what speeds are being reported for downloads.

B) what ISP are you using, and do you have some way to get usage reporting. For example, I just checked with Plus.Net and have used um, quite a few tens of GB (I now have a second connection, hence some days are high and some are low usage) - see the image...

If you can see usage, you may be able to work out whether these tablet games are causing a lot of traffic or not.

As Cindy34 has indicated, when connected by cable (with or without powerline {also known as HomePlug} connections), there will be 1-to-1 connection and faster throughput than via wireless (only one device can transmit at a time, so there must be a 'round robin' situation to let each device get a chance to send a packet).

Further, there are at least 3 versions of wireless connection, going up in speed 802.11 A / B / G

Sometimes a router will stick on the slowest connection speed, if any of the devices (perhaps an old laptop or mobile phone) is limited to 802.11A (up to 11 Mbps, from memory), whereas if everything can operate at a higher speed, then there should be fewer problems.

I want to test the speed of my broadband as someone suggested by connecting my laptop to my sky broadband router. what lead would I need to connect the two and where does it go? excuse my technical ignorance im useless

Ethernet cable. You can get a very short one from a Pound Shop.
There may be one in the box that your router came in.

Where does it go? That is more tricky as it will depend on the laptop. Some laptops may not even have an Ethernet port.

On the router itself, look on it for a row of ports often numbered 1,2,3,4
Put the cable in to number 1. Then other end into the ethernet port on the laptop.

You will then need to disable WiFi on the laptop and get Windows (or whatever operating system you use) to use the Ethernet connection (local area network).