What consumes the most data when you use the WiFi network at home

When we use a Wi-Fi wireless network, each device that we connect to the wireless network influences the rest of the devices, making them slow down. The same thing happens if we have a specific device consuming a lot of bandwidth, this collaterally affects the rest of the connected devices, no matter how much Internet bandwidth we have. Although the Wi-Fi 6 standard with OFDMA and MU-MIMO technology improves this enormously, it is very important to know what consumes the most data when we are using the home Wi-Fi network, in order to minimize that traffic or size the network. wireless properly so that it can handle all the traffic. If you have problems connecting to WiFi , you can read our tutorial to solve them.

What consumes the most on the WiFi network?

What consumes the most data when you use the WiFi network at home

All the devices that we connect to the WiFi wireless network consume data, but there are certain applications and types of uses that consume more bandwidth than others. Next, we are going to show you what consumes the most data.

Cloud Backups

The backup programs in the cloud, both for smartphones, tablets and computers, take advantage of making backup copies when we are in a Wi-Fi wireless network, since by default they do not do it in broadband networks mobile to save mobile data. In computers with WiFi we can define a network as “measured use”, with the aim of limiting the updating tasks and also backups that are made. In smartphones and tablets we can configure so that this task is carried out when we are connected to a WiFi network, while we are in the 4G or 5G network this task will not be carried out.

For example, WhatsApp backups in Google Drive or iCloud are only made when we are connected to a WiFi network, although we can always configure it so that they are also made when we are in the mobile broadband network. The same happens if we use Google Photos or Amazon Photos, these two applications will upload our photos to the cloud as long as we are connected to the WiFi network, so if we have a good number of accumulated photos they will have to upload them all at once, consuming one large amount of data on WiFi.

video streaming

Another use that we can give to wireless networks is video streaming, both on computers, smartphones, tablets as well as on Smart TVs, and we must bear in mind that a movie or series in 4K resolution has a bitrate of about 25Mbps, so we can consume about 200MB per minute or about 11GB per hour, although it all depends on the type of content we are watching, if it has HDR and other factors.

VPN para Netflix o YouTube

Without a doubt, video streaming is one of the uses that consumes the most data on a wireless network, for this reason, we will always recommend connecting your Smart TV via cable to the local network, and not using the WiFi wireless network. whenever possible, with the aim of not saturating it and leaving it free for other uses that must necessarily go through WiFi, such as smartphones or tablets.

Social networks

The third use of the Internet that consumes the most data on a WiFi wireless network is social networks. All of us use smartphones to watch TikTok videos, Instagram stories and photos, and even Facebook. The use of social networks that consumes the most data is video, so spending an hour watching all the videos on TikTok will consume several GB without a doubt, the same thing happens on Instagram with videos, reels and photos, and is that social networks in general is one of the uses that consume the most data on a wireless network.

If there are several of us at home who are connected to the same Wi-Fi wireless network (to the same router), with these uses that we have explained to you, we could begin to notice that the Wi-Fi network is very slow and that video streaming can even be stop at certain times, since it is what usually suffers the most even if we have a buffer to mitigate this problem. Of course, we have ruled out the use of P2P programs because it is clear that this is what consumes the most of all without a doubt, if we download a 50GB movie via WiFi, we will monopolize all the bandwidth for a short period of time. time, but in that period the rest of the traffic will be greatly affected.

This slowness is due to the fact that we have a very high traffic in the same frequency band, to try to solve this problem you can:

  • Use different frequency bands for different uses, especially if our router is a simultaneous triple band, we will be able to connect the smartphones to a 5GHz band and the TV to another band dedicated just for it.
  • Mount a WiFi Mesh system , where the nodes are connected via cable. This detail is very important, because if they are connected by WiFi we will not solve the problem, in fact, we can make it worse because there is more traffic on the wireless network.
  • Use some PLCs with WiFi Mesh so that the backbone network works through the electrical network, such as those from the manufacturer devolo Magic 2 WiFi 6.

These are the three uses of the Wi-Fi wireless network that consume the most data with our computers, smartphones and tablets.