Sharing home internet with teenagers

Being a teenager is horrible, though it’s arguably easier than having to live with one.

From rapidly cycling hormones to the agonies of unrequited love and the shifting sands of friendship groups, teenagers have plenty of reasons to be grumpy and truculent.

And so it proves.

A great deal of the typical teenager’s life is spent in their rooms, which often degenerate into something resembling a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

While it’s best not to speculate on everything that goes on in a teenager’s room, much of it involves the internet.

Gaming, social media, YouTube, group chats and – occasionally – homework all require a stable and moderately fast broadband connection.

This is particularly true if other household members are also at home, especially home workers or content creators.

But good luck telling a teenager they need to drop offline for an hour because your ADSL connection can’t support your Teams call and their Call of Duty marathon at the same time.

These are our tips for sharing home internet with teenagers, from advanced planning to optimising connectivity speeds…

Broadening out the debate

This blog has previously suggested that households don’t always need the fastest internet connection available to them.

However, we’ll caveat that advice in scenarios where households are also occupied by a teenager – or teenagers plural.

While teenagers are fairly tech-savvy and often understand the internet better than their parents, they’re not always good at compromising or making sacrifices to others’ benefit.

If you can get 500Mbps full fibre broadband, it’s probably worth upgrading your existing Fibre to the Cabinet connection, even if the full fibre ISP isn’t your favourite brand.

Teenagers are online a lot, frequently engaged in bandwidth-intensive activities, and they often lack the patience to wait while a stream buffers or latency resolves itself.

Teenagers may have unusual sleep routines, especially after leaving school or in the holidays, and their online calendar might not blend in seamlessly with everyone else’s internet needs.

Additional bandwidth should ensure everyone can access anything at any time, especially if there are smart devices simultaneously demanding data from the ISP’s servers.

Full fibre broadband tends to be equally fast at uploading and downloading, whereas slower connections are asymmetric and may struggle with video calls or large file uploads.

What if I can’t get full fibre broadband?

If full fibre services aren’t in your postcode yet, sharing home internet with teenagers becomes rather more challenging.

It may be necessary to introduce an element of scheduling; anything goes after 5pm as long as bandwidth-intensive activities aren’t undertaken during working hours.

This could be organised by using diaries, rotas or simply an up-front agreement about who gets priority and when.

Ultimately, there wouldn’t be a broadband connection without adults working to pay for it, and this argument could even be used to illustrate the merits of hard work.

Parents may be tempted to avoid emotional meltdowns at all costs, but accepting compromise is an essential life skill which needs to be inculcated from an early age.

If two people urgently need to be online simultaneously, Fibre to the Cabinet or ADSL connections might benefit from other web-enabled devices being temporarily disconnected.

It can also help to reboot the wireless router beforehand, connecting one device via an Ethernet cable or Powerline adaptor so the other has exclusive WiFi access.

Other ways of reducing bandwidth strain include downloading large media files and conducting software updates overnight, when there’s less network traffic both inside and outside the home.

That’ll also helps adults to avoid straining connections during the internet rush hour, at a time when children are most likely to be streaming, gaming or video calling.

You may wish to consider installing a second line or internet connection into your property or placing greater reliance on mobile data across 4G or 5G networks.

This could take the form of greater smartphone usage, investing in a MiFi hub to create a small wireless network or buying a plug-in USB dongle to power a single computer.