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The pandemic made it clear that the millions of homes with no broadband or poor broadband were cut off from taking the office or the school home. But the pandemic also showed many additional millions of homes that their current ISP connection isn’t up to snuff for working or doing schoolwork from home. Families often found that multiple adults and students couldn’t share the bandwidth at the same time.
The simplest explanation for this is that homes were suddenly expected to connect to a school or work servers, use new services like Zoom, or make telemedicine connections to talk to doctors. These new requirements have significantly different bandwidth needs when a home’s big bandwidth need was watching multiple video streams at the same time. Consider the following bandwidth needs listed by Zoom:
Zoom says that a home should have a 2 Mbps connection, both upload and download, to sustain a Zoom session between just two people. The amount of download bandwidth increases with each person connected to the call, meaning Zoom recommends 6 Mbps download for a meeting with three other people.
Telemedicine connections tend to be even larger than this and require the simultaneous use of both upload and download bandwidth. Connections to work and schools servers vary in size depending upon the software being used, but the VPNs from these connections are typically as large or larger than the Zoom requirements.
Straight math shows fairly large requirements if three or four people are trying to make these same kinds of 2-way simultaneous connections at the same time. But houses are also using traditional bandwidth during the pandemic like watching videos, gaming, web browsing, and downloading large work files.
The simplistic way to look at bandwidth needs is to add up the various uses. For instance, if four people in a home wanted to have a Zoom conversation with another person, the home would need a simultaneous connection of 8 Mbps both up and down. But bandwidth use in a house is not that simple, and a lot of other factors contribute to the quality of bandwidth connections within a home. Consider all of the following:
The average home experiencing problems when working at home during the pandemic is unlikely to diagnose the reasons for the poor bandwidth fully. It is fairly obvious if you have problems with having multiple zoom connections if the home upload speed isn’t fast enough to accommodate all connections. But beyond the lack of broadband capacity, it is not easy for a homeowner to understand any other local problems affecting their broadband experience. The easiest fix for home broadband problems is for an ISP to offer and deliver faster speed since excess capacity can overcome many of the other problems that might be plaguing a given home.
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Ideal for bandwidth is for each participant of a meeting to have just a single bi-directional A/V session to a central server running on a very high speed link (handling perhaps 30+ streams for crowded school classes). That then leads to privacy issues since the server will be working with the clear A/V streams, unless schools and businesses do it themselves. But, can they? Maybe we can use some social-distancing online.