​Real World Problems

What’s the state of technology in UK homes? It’s a question we regularly ask ourselves at Customised HQ. We come up with many answers and devise solutions to help our clients have a good experience with home technology.

To further our improvement of the services we provide we sought out a member of the public to ask about their views on the state of technology in their home. For some background, our interviewee is not a customer of Customised, she is a homeowner with 3 children and her and her partner both work full-time. They live in a small Norfolk village, fifteen miles south of Norwich.

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We started by asking her what the demand was like for technology in their home.

“With three children aged between seven and sixteen, we have several smartphones, tablets and computers between us. Two of our kids enjoy gaming on Xbox and Playstation and our TV viewing habits are increasingly weighted towards streamed, on-demand content. We also have a wireless music system and voice assistant which we use daily.”

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This amount of technology is fairly typical for a family of five. I asked her what were the common technology frustrations in the home.

“Our internet connection is not able to handle the demands, we have to always be mindful of who’s online and what we want to do. When one of our boys is gaming online we have to accept that no one else can stream TV, on occasions it becomes very slow to use social media or browse the internet.”

There are two factors which can be the cause here, broadband speed and wi-fi coverage. I asked if she knew her broadband speed and what handles the wi-fi coverage in their home.

“When we first moved in to this house our speeds were very low, around 2Mbps. At this time we really struggled with any online activities. However recently we have had an increase in speed to around 12 or 13 Mbps. We do find this fluctuates a lot during the course of the day. Our wi-fi signal comes from our BT Hub but it couldn’t service the whole home so we added a range extender. This is a frustrating piece of tech. We constantly have to reconnect to it and the speeds are definitely slower when you are connected to this.”

The download speeds that she mentioned are capable of handling the demand, but only just. The wi-fi coverage could be a major culprit. The range extender should be investigated, is it in the right place, is it the right product?

Cheap alternative upgrades could be a set of HomePlugs, providing internet over mains power cabling in the home, budget around £120 for this. Another would be to run inexpensive Cat5e or Cat6 ethernet cables to areas of the home and install wireless access points, the cost of this is higher due to the labour for installing cables but budget around £300 for a single access point install. Our final option to improve the wi-fi coverage would be the installation and set up of a MESH wi-fi system. A MESH kit from Amplifi costs from around £400 with the set up, a more expensive option, but the coverage this will give and provide a single wi-fi network for the home gives a great wi-fi experience. The Amplifi solution will also provide features like a Guest Wi-Fi Network for visitors to your home and offer easy to use parental controls for limiting internet time for specific devices or users.

We will follow up this blog with some of the insights we gathered from this homeowner on topics such as self installed technology and where to find a professional installer of tech.

Customised are experts at improving both the broadband speeds coming into your home and increasing the wireless coverage quality throughout your home.

Contact us to arrange a free consultation.