Is your internet slowing down? Your newest friend(s) could be to blame:
Bottom Line: Try this one. Hey Alexa, why's my internet slowing down? There's been one very consistent trend over the past 20 years. We love the internet. We love always being connected and we're constantly adding more devices to our WI-FI connection. If you have a top speed connection that's highly reliable you're probably not noticing your internet connection slowing down. Anything less than that and it's altogether possible.
We already were streaming Netflix, while on an iPad with our kids posting on Instagram on their phones. Then we added our digital at-home assistants in the mix. Not surprisingly there have been widespread complaints about lagging internet speed in the wake of the holiday season. With the top (non-gift card) gift being a digital at-home assistant - let alone any other digitally connected devices you added in your home during the holidays...Many families have begun to experience internet performance issues.
It's not complicated. You have X-amount of bandwidth on your internet connection. That bandwidth is split across however many devices are accessing it at any given time. In many cases there's enough juice to allow max speed for all demands but increasingly that's not the case. The complaints have become so prominent that Google is actually in the process of redoing the way they send "data packets" and updates to its Google Home and Chromecast products. Google had routinely been sending one large packet of data which was actually causing a complete crash of many at-home internet routers that were already being used with other devices. Google's now looking at smaller, more regular updates.
Anyway, if this sounds familiar it's probably worth testing your internet speed. Here's a link to Speedtest to easily test your speed for free. http://www.speedtest.net/
You can then see what happens when you're using all of your devices. You might find you problems and answers pretty quickly by doing so.