Wi-Fi – Make sure you know your wifi password. If Santa delivered some new technology to your home, you will need your wi-fi password to connect.  If your wi-fi was provided by BBnet, your password should be clearly labelled on your router or modem. If you are not sure please email support@bbnet.ie If your router/extender/ powerline was not provided by BBnet, we would not have a record of your Wi-Fi information.

Know your limits – Internet usage over the Christmas period increases, with new technology in the house, or with more people home for Christmas. Our fibre packages are all 100% unlimited,  However our Jet, Life and legacy wireless packages have a daily fair usage amount associated with the package. If you exceed the daily fair usage policy, your connection will slow down for the remainder of the day, until midnight.

If you are unsure what your daily fair usage policy allows, please drop an email to support@bbnet.ie and we can let you know.

For Jet packages this is 30GB per day, and for Life it is 20GB per day. Also, it is worth noting that any traffic on your connection overnight ( between midnight and 8am), is not counted as part of your fair usage amount. For larger downloads, this is an ideal time to let it run.

New Toys and Devices –  As Santa delivers gifts all over the world, on Christmas morning many wake up to new phones, tablets, laptops, games consoles or electronic toys. Remember, when you start using these for the first time, devices can download updates to the firmware or software on the device. This can happen in the background of your device and you may not notice this is happening. Similarly, updates for games or games consoles may be required when you first power on the device. This is all fine, but remember it can eat in to your fair usage policy, or it can clog up the home network and other devices have slow internet.

Gaming and consoles – Gaming in itself, does not use much bandwidth however two things should be noted. Firstly downloads of the game itself. More and more this is the delivery method when you buy a game. We have seen games where the size of the file is upwards of 100Gb which will both take a while to complete, but also can affect daily fair usage. This is not an issue for fibre customers, but customers on Jet, Life and older wireless packages should be aware of this. Secondly as new consoles have come on stream this year, and are a common present from Santa, the same may apply for software or firmware updates.

.

Video Streaming – One of the most popular uses of the internet in homes is streaming from Netflix, Chromecast, Fire sticks, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, RTE Player etc. Associated with how each of these services performs, is the speed available to your device, and the amount of data the application uses.  Netflix, as one of the more popular services is very clear on what using its service requires for each type of video stream.

If you are streaming Netflix in standard definition, the data it uses is approximately 1 GB of traffic per device, per hour. So if 4 people are streaming Netflix in the home, using standard definition streaming, you are using 4GB of data per hour.  If you are streaming in High Definition , each device will use up to 3GB per hour. For 4 devices streaming in HD, that is 12 GB of usage per hour. If you are streaming in UHD / 4K, it can use up to 7GB per hour, per device.  More information on Netflix data usage and how to adjust your settings is available here :

Video Streaming also has minimum speed requirements it needs to run each device and as an example, for Netflix they are listed below. Remember this is per device, so if you have 4 people using Netflix on devices at High Definition, you will need 5 Mb per device so 20Mb just to support those devices

More information on speeds for Netflix is available here. .

• 0.5 Megabits per second – Required broadband connection speed
• 1.5 Megabits per second – Recommended broadband connection speed
• 3.0 Megabits per second – Recommended for SD quality
• 5.0 Megabits per second – Recommended for HD quality
• 25 Megabits per second – Recommended for Ultra HD quality

Other services like Youtube, RTE Player, Prime etc will have similar recommendations and requirements.

Cloud Services – With new devices comes new services and possibilities, but also can cause some issues. A lot of new electronics comes with free cloud backup services ( for example Google Drive, iCloud, One Drive, Dropbox etc). These services allow you to store information in the cloud, or backup your phone or tablet in case you need it. While is fantastic, when you first start to use these services they will upload all your photos, documents, files etc to the cloud. This can cause a lot of upload traffic, and can either clog up your home network, or can affect any fair usage amount that may apply to your broadband package with us. Setting any backups to happen overnight will help in this regard.