Do not saturate the Internet connection: 5 things you do wrong
When saturated, an Internet connection can significantly reduce its quality and speed. So that this does not happen, there are a series of measures that can be carried out. As always, prevention is often better than action once Internet is saturated.
With more and more devices needing or allowing network connectivity, it is relatively normal for our Internet connection to become saturated. This was exemplified in a spectacular way, especially at the beginning of the pandemic, when the forced quarantine caused a huge increase in internet traffic. This resulted in a significant increase in Internet traffic, with telecommunications companies taking critical measures and suggesting rational use of data to their users precisely for fear of collapse.
What causes network saturation?
Network saturation is usually caused by an increase in activity or number of users on a fixed network (same cause for mobile networks) over a period of time, generating unusual activity traffic that networks cannot assimilate. This causes a jam or crash and prevents other users from processing your connection requests.
WiFi channel saturation
In the case of Internet connections, they can have different causes and consequences depending on whether they are fixed or wireless. The saturation or congestion of fixed networks occurs when the network (or part of it) has more traffic than it can carry, since it is receiving too many requests and not able to solve them all. It is what happens when there are a large number of devices connected to a router or access point.
In the case of Wi-Fi wireless connections, saturations are normally due to the simultaneous coincidence of numerous connection requests by a number of users that exceeds the capacity of the channel and therefore saturates the network.
The saturation of WiFi wireless networks occurs in environments where several Wi-Fi networks coexist simultaneously (especially urban environments). Today it is very common to find many networks in the immediate environment sharing spectrum, so it is usually necessary to make adjustments to the signal of our WiFi network to prevent it from overlapping with the signal of other networks.
Measures to avoid saturating the Internet
To prevent the network from becoming saturated, it is preferable put in airplane mode or turn off devices that you are not using. In this way, you will be able to have a better connection on the devices that you are using. Even though you’re not actively using them, many of these devices are performing network functions in the background, updating services, displaying notifications, and so on.
One of the services that consumes the most bandwidth is, for example, streaming platforms. If you fear that you may saturate the network, if you are using a streaming platform and the Internet signal is very slow, reduce video quality to stop saturating the connection. Another alternative, if possible, is to download the audiovisual content whenever possible. It is preferable to download (legally, of course) a movie than to watch it online, since less data can be used when downloading.
Wi-Fi channel saturation.
The saturation of the Internet can correspond to the WiFi channel saturation if that is how we have our device connected. Each WiFi network is broadcast on a single channel and if we have 3 or 4 WiFi networks on the same channel trying to transmit information simultaneously, it will happen that the performance of the WiFi networks will be considerably degraded due to channel saturation.
In this sense, it is convenient to use tools such as Wi-Fi Analyzer to check the radio frequency spectrum around us and see what channels our neighbors’ SSIDs use. If our WiFi network is on a channel shared by other networks, simply change to another free channel to recover optimal network performance. You can change the channel as many times as you want, check the result when changing to a new channel and if this is not satisfactory, change to another until you choose the one in which the network performance is optimal.
Another aspect that can cause network saturation is the massive content download. It is advisable to try to do this (including downloading updates) during less busy hours within the bulk of our Internet connection traffic. If we avoid doing it at peak times, we will avoid collapsing the network.
