New Poster
•
2 Messages
modem question.... teacher here.
Hello everyone.
Due to Covid-19, our whole family will have to do schoolings from home for the time being. This means us family of 5 (me/spouse are teachers while our kids will have their own schoolings) will need to be connected to wifi (laptop and tablets) and to be able to handle a lot of video streaming.
I have no idea if my modem can handle that much traffic. Have the Infinity "Dual Band 802.11 XB3" modem. Will this modem be strong enough? Should I ask for an upgrade? A simple wifi speed test from my laptop has it at 120 mps.
Since my wife and I are teachers, are there any special promotions that we should know about?
I've tried the chat box assistant thing and it was no help and I cannot figure out how to get to a live rep to help out...
thank you
strega7
Contributor
•
414 Messages
5 years ago
I don't know anything about that modem, but in my experience, video conferences don’t need too much bandwidth (at least with typical 720p cameras and default settings) but they do need stability. When using wi-fi, I find that location matters a lot (far more so than other internet uses) and wired works best – I have yet to have a glitch on a wired connection with many hours of meetings, whereas on wi-fi, better locations will provide about one minor glitch per hour or two and bad locations can cause bad glitches within a few minutes. (Oddly enough right near the router seems to be one of the bad locations for wi-fi in my testing. Fortunately, it's also trivially easy to use a wire there.)
Something you might try is setting up a zoom or skype (or whatever you plan to use) meeting and get all of your family members on it for a couple of hours and see if anything goes wrong. (I'm assuming that when you do a meeting like this, that data will still be going across the internet, though I suppose the application might get clever and set up local peer to peer connections.)
Another reason for doing a test is that in my experience, the bigger problems with video conferencing are people with terrible lighting and poor microphones. This is especially bad when it's the teacher.
My feeling is that the teachers (at least) should probably be wired.
There may be variation based on what application and settings you're using.
0
0
LELindley
New Poster
•
2 Messages
5 years ago
it turns out that I have "Peformance Internet Plus" which is 100/5. Speed test from my laptop gives me 120/5.7 (download/upload)....
talking with a tech savvy friend of mine, its the upload speed that I should be worried about. With two teachers in this house plus 3 kids (students) who will also be doing live teaching/learning from home. The upload speed is tooo low.
I'm jealous that he is getting at least 50/50 with Fios for half the price I'm paying for mine.
Can anyone from xfinity know if i can at least get a free upgrade to Blast! since we are educators?
0
0