Tips to Make Your Home Internet Faster

What are some tips to make your home internet faster? I spoke to modem expert Duncan Potter of ARRIS to find out tips on improving Wi-Fi and getting the most out of existing internet connections.

Tips to Make Your Home Internet Faster

Lisa LaGrou of Oakland County Moms – What are some tips to make your home Internet faster?

ARRIS’s VP of Marketing, Duncan Potter – There are a few things you need to consider when you’re actually thinking about this. The first thing to do is actually look at the device that’s actually connecting you out to the internet. A lot of people have devices that are 4 or 5 years old… and typically at that point, they’re not deploying or using the latest technology that’s going to give you the best performance. The next thing to do is to think about what you’re actually using your internet connection for. For instance, if you’re in a house where you’ve got a couple of avid gamers, then you really need to be thinking about giving them a wired connection and putting that game station through what called a DMZ, which I’ll explain in a few minutes. The other piece is if you have a wireless infrastructure in your home, like a wireless router and you’re using iPads and other tablet devices and you’re using a lot of wireless connectivity, then there’s a few things you really need to think about with that. The first one is, please take it out of the closet. Take it out of the basement and put it somewhere where it’s in the middle of the house because that will give you the best possible performance and the best possible coverage. The next thing is move it away from the cordless phone in your house and if you’re putting it in your kitchen, keep it well away from the microwave. Both of those use signals or generate signals that can interrupt the frequencies that are generally used with wireless technology. Then there are various other things we can talk about in a moment that you need to be thinking about in terms of the specifications of those devices.

Lisa LaGrou of Oakland County Moms – As far as tips to make your home internet faster, what should you look for in a modem?

ARRIS’s VP of Marketing, Duncan Potter – The first thing to do is take a look at the specification and there’s probably 4 or 5 things you need to identify. The first one is look at the number of channels that it is actually using to carry the internet signal from your provider, and this is typically a number that looks like 16 by 4, 8 by 4, 4 by 4, something like that. And, what that means is, it’s not TV channels, it’s the number of channels that are there within the cable infrastructure to carry the internet signal. So a 16 by 4 modem means 16 channels coming in to your home and four going out of your home. So you need more on what we call the downstream, coming in to your home because obviously with things like video you’re actually watching things come into the home. Upstream is important if you have things like gaming and interactive gaming going on in your home as well. The next thing you need to look for is what standard that technology supports. The latest technology or standard that most operators are deploying…supports 3.0….One other thing to remember is that if you do have really avid gamers in your house, you need to be thinking about giving them a wired connection. One, because it keeps them off wireless so you can use wireless for everything else. And, the other thing is that it will stop the screaming for the simple reason that it is the best way of providing the best performance possible to an online gamer. Then, there’s another acronym you need to think about which is a DMZ… It basically means you’re plugging those gamers into something that gives them the fastest possible connection out to the internet.

Lisa LaGrou of Oakland County Moms – Why do some modems work better than others? Wired vs wireless.

ARRIS’s VP of Marketing, Duncan Potter – There’s a big difference between wired and wireless. Wireless is really all about connectivity, flexibility, mobility and all of those things. It gives you the ability to not have wires running all over your home. And, especially when thinking of wireless extenders, even in the biggest homes, it gives you great coverage. Wired is really focused on providing the best possible performance to those devices that use it. And they really into two categories…gaming stations (especially if you got somebody playing performance high interactive games like Call of Duty type games), and very high definition TV type devices. And they usually work best with a wired connection.

 

Lisa LaGrou of Oakland County Moms – Is your modem associated with an internet connection provider or is it an independent product?

ARRIS’s VP of Marketing, Duncan Potter – We actually provide both. So, we do a lot of work with the operators and they provide our technology along with their packages. But, one of the things to look at is whether you actually pay a cable modem rental fee. What you might find is that with something like our SB6183 product which is really the world’s fastest cable modem at this point, it may well be that over the life of the product, that will actually end up saving you some money. Because you’re making an up front investment, it’ll be supported by somebody like Comcast and it’ll work great, and what it will do is reduce the amount of rental fee you would end up paying for the device that’s actually in your home.

Lisa LaGrou of Oakland County Moms – So, basically what we’re paying to rent right now we could actually own outright through you and they would work us to support this system for tips to make your home internet faster?

ARRIS’s VP of Marketing, Duncan Potter – Absolutely. In the example of Comcast, when you contact Comcast if you have your own cable modem, they will ask you Ok, you want to set this up, it’s your own device. That’s fine. And, you can buy that product from outlets like Best Buy, Amazon.com… and if you want to find out more information, the thing to do there is to go to surfboard.com and you’ll find buyers guides, additional resources, advice, and also the full range of products that we provide that you can buy through those outlets.

For more tips to make your home internet faster, visit ARRIS.