Did you have a good Christmas? What was your best present? Did you get lots of Smart Tech and digital gadgets? Good for you!
The market for Smart devices and high definition television keeps on growing. Smart speakers are now on to their fourth generation, and with 5g technology becoming available throughout the country their usefulness is becoming amplified.
What’s 5g got to do with your Smart Speaker or Home Automation system?
Smart devices connect to one another wirelessly, that’s true, but they don’t juts perform one operation or have one conversation with another smart device at a time. Smart devices are always on, looking out for updates, listening out for each other as well as your voice in order to perform their role properly. If they didn’t there would be no point having them. There’s no point yelling “Alexa! Turn the kettle on!” in the lounge if nothing in the kitchen is connected.
And this uses digital data. If you only have three or four Smart machines then a run-of-the mill router can more than satisfy your home system’s data requirements, but, as we fill our homes with more and more Smart devices, TV which are connected to Netflix and Google, speakers which are linked to your Spotify account and home security which is uploading sound and images to the cloud whenever anybody walks onto your property there is a need for a lot of data. Lots and lots of it.
I Feel The Need, The Need For Data Speed!
It’s not just the amount of data you have either, it’s the speed of that data which is important. There’s not much point having unlimited data if it comes in so slowly that it would take hours to download a movie. Playing games online or streaming films would be impossible as the action would freeze every few seconds while buffering took place and the data caught up with where you’d got to in the action.
Ultrafast data doesn’t only mean that your Smart devices can work more efficiently though. It may seem that once you have fast or superfast then ultrafast is gilding the lily, but this is to miss the point. The speed at which data is delivered is inextricably linked to the number of devices you can have working at any one time. A movie will use a certain amount of data, so, depending on whether you download or stream it will affect the amount of data there is available to other devices. If you can download an entire movie in less than a minute then it will have negligible impact on your smart devices unless you call on all of them to do different tasks while the movie loads. If on the other hand you’re streaming a movie and the cache is five minutes ahead of where you are in the narrative then that’s five minutes when all the data coming into your home can be used for anything but streaming the sound and vision without you noticing. It’s when you do notice that there’s a problem. There’s nothing like the particular frustration we feel when we’re just getting to a good bit and the action freezes! Only for it to stop and start again until you’ve turned everything off and on again. But this simply doesn’t happen with Ultrafast broadband, and if it does, talk to your supplier and get it fixed.
Totally Digital
We started off talking about flat screen HD television sets. It’s true to say that the way we watch TV since the Digital Switchover in 2012 has changed in ways that were the stuff of science fiction before. To simply be able to pause, rewind and watch a live sports event was a childish fantasy. If you missed a show, that was it, there was no catch-up or +1 channel. And recording an entire series as it was shown would mean endless VHS programming, making sure the right tape was in the machine, and heaven forbid the tape ran out before the end of the show!
But wait! What if your receiver is damaged or starts to move about thanks to storms? If you’re watching Sky TV through a satellite dish which is poorly maintained, or Freeview using an aerial which is rusty or loose you’ll find that you don’t get all the channels you expect, you experience glitching and freezing. Having to reset decoder boxes because channels have dropped off often means losing all of your stored shows and having to reset all your scheduled recordings. A time consuming, tedious job which could have been avoided if your aerial or satellite system had been properly serviced.
If you’re interested in having a flat screen TV hung on the wall, aerial and satellite receiver servicing and repairs, or even ultrafast broadband then why not give Briant Communications a call on 01273 465377 or email us at enquiries@briantcoms.com We’ve over 30 years experience as aerial and satellite dish engineers and now take on all types of Smart Home and home cinema installations with our new enterprise, Briant Broadband supplying ultrafast digital data to the Worthing area.