When you’re not home, nagging little doubts can crowd your mind. Did I turn off the stove? Did I set the security alarm? With a smart home, you can quiet all these concerns with a glance at your smartphone to see connected devices and appliances that tell you what is happening at home.

Smart home technology refers to any suite of devices, appliances, or systems that can be independently and remotely controlled, and connected to your home network and the Internet via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and other communication protocols.  Whether you communicate with the device by voice, remote control, tablet, or smartphone, your home reacts. For example, you can tell your thermostat to turn your A/C up about an hour before you get home, saving you money on electricity bills.

Getting caught up with all the new gadgets creating your smart home is easy, and it’s also easy to forget about the one thing that makes them all work – your Internet connection.

Most of these devices don’t necessarily require a lot of bandwidth individually and use quick bursts even if they are always connected like Google Home or Amazon’s Alexa. Together with your mobile devices, laptops, PCs, and gaming consoles, they can use much of your Internet, resulting in sluggish Internet and slower response times.  Even a doorbell cam requires an Internet connection to upload its video to the cloud so you can then monitor it by downloading or streaming it to your device. When you add in other bandwidth-hungry applications such as 4K TV and video calling, you may need more bandwidth to ensure that you have enough to run all your devices.

To ensure that you have enough Internet speed, evaluate your current usage:

1. The number of people in your household using the Internet daily.
2. How many devices are connected to the Internet, including tablets, gaming consoles, and smart devices.
3. Work from home, download and upload large files, and participation in video calling.
4. Video quality used for streaming TV and movies, such as HD or 4K.
5. On what level of online gaming does your household participate.
6. Download of large files from the cloud or via the Internet.

Your Internet subscription needs to easily handle your daily requirements and the extra load from your smart home devices. Smart City Telecom offers 1 Gbps fiber-to-the-home and Home Wi-Fi, giving you Internet fast enough to cover the total number of people and all the devices connected to your network, including smart home devices connected in the background. Visit https://fibersignup.smartcitytelecom.com/ to sign up today.