The best highways in the country can have impeded traffic due to high vehicle volumes. The same can happen with your internet. Imagine, in our car analogy, that you are driving on I-69 in Fort Wayne. There are six lanes of traffic, and during certain days and times, rush hour traffic can decrease the speed of the cars traveling. These cars are still moving towards their destination, however, at a reduced pace.

Similarly, the same principles apply to the internet. These devices are competing for space and speed. Just as rush hour traffic can affect traveling speed, so can the quantity of devices. Some devices perform better when they have 25 Mbps available to them, like 4K TVs used for streaming, while other devices do not require as much speed to perform at their maximum. See the table for a more detailed list of devices. 

The lower-speed devices are still taking up space on the highway and can drag the overall speed down of your network. Two semi-trucks driving side-by-side would decrease the speed of traffic on a highway. A way to fix this is to create multiple networks and group similar devices like TVs or cameras together. Relate this to directing your devices, placing the faster ones into the passing lanes, and creating a bike lane to move the slower bicycles and foot traffic to the side of the road.

You can prioritize traffic or bandwidth to specific devices, even during specific times. Think of this as vehicles moving out of the road or slowing down for emergency vehicles to ensure they have room.

Creating networks and prioritizing can be done with CommandIQ which is included in all the Steuben County REMC plans. Steuben County REMC offers plans from 100Mbs to 1GB, allowing as many devices as you want. However, the speeds of those devices may decrease if your plan is not optimized for the traffic throughout your home. This all leads to at what point another lane is needed, hence a larger plan providing additional bandwidth or expressway lanes for traffic to enhance your cruising experience!