Very soon school will recommence in the shadow of the COVID specter. Looking at current trends, I predict that much of the coming school year will be carried out remotely using a wide variety of distance learning techniques. For the parents of school-aged children, this will have several impacts.
This spring some learned about the need for more connectable devices as the demand for computers at home suddenly increased when sharing one computer between 3 children simply did not work (and other similar scenarios). Then, as more devices were connected, the need for more bandwidth (simply more speed either in your internet connection or in your home wifi, or both) became apparent (the internet connection that was adequate for shopping online, getting the news simply came to a halt when 2 people tried to operate simultaneous video chats). So how much bandwidth (still just speed) does your household need?
Let me start by describing one cause of confusion. For news, streaming movies, reading email (the stuff we used to do), download speed is all that matters; but for video chatting, video conferencing, video phone calls, most forms of classroom “sharing” you use as much upload speed (previously unimportant to most) as download speed and this is a gamechanger for you and for the ISPs (Internet Service Providers). So a 20mb down by 0.5mb up service used to be great and as soon as distance learning started in your home it was woefully inadequate to the point of being non-functional. Just as cloud-based services do much better on connections with much more upload speed, say 20 by 20 MB, so virtual classrooms of various forms also work much better with symmetrical connections (same up speed as down speed).
But, how much is enough? Voice phone calls need 256K x 256K per active phone call, video chats vary somewhat but generally 2MB x 2MB minimum and 5MB x 5MB for full screen and 10MB x 10MB for high resolution per active “chat”. If you have 3 students at home using standard resolution remotes into school, 15MB x 15MB will be consumed upfront with internet searches, videos (watching), cell phone connections all piling on even more demand. If you run a business from home and rely on the internet to interact with your clientele, add even more. So, in my example maybe 30MB up by 50MB down will keep everything flowing during peak demand.
Based on what you have been previously offered by your local internet service provider, these numbers may seem ridiculous; but, let me assure you this is a real part of what distance learning does to your internet usage. Until ISPs catch up with this sudden change in demand, some sacrifices will be made (doing low-res remotes when possible, waiting till later to stream videos or catch up on social networking, etc.). Start by checking with your ISP to see if they have upped their offerings to meet this demand or plan to in the future. If not, then looking to competing service providers may be necessary.