Before 2020, Shresth Saini, Audio Visual lead of The Mobile Indian, rarely had problems with his home internet service — till a covid induced lockdown across the country made work from home a necessity instead of an option.
Saini’s home is in a remote village in western Uttar Pradesh. To keep the show going in the new circumstances, he had to move to work applications like video conferencing quickly that ate up a lot of data, besides file transfer services to export large files to his team. During the same period, other family members were also sharing the same internet connection for their work. Children in school were using it for online education and elders for entertainment and keeping a tab on the news.
The arrangement worked for the first few days. But then everyone using the internet started facing issues like poor internet speed, video calls would freeze abruptly, file transfers took an extended time and deadlines were being missed. “It had never been that bad,” he said.
Many of us will empathise with what Saini went through, having experienced the shift of the home Broadband from a simple utility with limited use to an absolutely critical one that needed to match up to needs all the time.
So, what was happening? The infrastructure is generally accustomed to certain activity peaks at specific times of the day for home users, such as in the evening when people return from work and get online at home. But, the Pandemic changed it all. Almost all interactions move online. Everyone at home is sharing the same internet connections throughout the day and using data-hungry apps that were usually reserved for offices and schools. In other words, it was Bandwidth on demand throughout the day.
This is where the routers, the devices connecting your devices to the internet, started falling short. Many did not provide the same internet speed to all the concurrent users. If one uses a streaming service and other users are doing video conferencing, they will face patchy connectivity and poor experience.
To address this issue of seamless connectivity for many concurrently connected devices,Airtelhas a solution now. Airtel Xstream Fiber offers its users an advanced dual Band wifi router to provide 1 Gbps data speeds over wifi. As a result, users will no longer have to rely on a dedicated LAN cable for such high speeds. And that’s not all. One can connect 64 devices to the router concurrently on 2.4Ghz or 5Ghz band. It is worth mentioning that most of the other routers from different service providerscap off at 600Mbps for wireless speed.
A Dual-Band router operates at 2.4GHz and 5GHz simultaneously to give us the ultimate performance and flexibility. Users can even connect to their preferred network depending on their usage. For instance, for video streaming or online gaming session 5GHz network can be selected, and all other tasks like internet surfing, reading etc, the 2.5 Ghz can be the go-to band. They can cover a large area and can connect 64 devices, as in the case of the Airtel router, simultaneously.
Another exciting feature of a dual-band router is that the signal does not interfere with other electronic devices like microwaves, Bluetooth devices or cordless phones, which run on a 2.4Ghz frequency. Thus, disconnection is rare.
Users must also keep one more thing in mind when setting up an internet connection at home. Cybercriminals have proven to be really fast, almost always staying one step ahead of the steps particular websites or apps take to control risks for their users, which brings us to the first, and possibly most effortless action you can take to protect yourself. Get a broadband connection that acts as your first line of defence against attacks.
Consider how Airtel’s Xstream fibre has added a next-generation Firewall to your hi-speed broadband. It’s offering Airtel Secure Internet, which comes at a nominal price, but like insurance, it can provide you with some real peace of mind if used well.
It has options to enable everything from Virus protection to detecting malwares to content filtering and even intrusion detection. At just Rs 99 month.
What’s more, you can try it out for a month before you decide to take it. While its Virus Protection mode is obvious, its child safe and work mode allows you to block unwanted sites or even streaming platforms if they are a distraction at work.
The Airtel Secure Internet is a pioneering move that lays the benchmark for service providers to be alive to their user’s requirements and anticipate their next need.