Perfect Partner – Choose the right router for smart tv | OPEE

Having a smart tv is a life candy, but engaging a “loading” status in a TV application is disappointing. Despite of the plan you bought with your local carrier, it would be the issue related to your current router. Let’s start to check an example of a router connecting to an OPEE smart TV.

  1. How does a smart TV support the Internet via a router?
  2. How much network bandwith does a smart TV need?
  3. A simple and fast way to troubleshoot whether the router is too old
  4. What router should you use?
  5. About OPEE Brand.

1. How does a smart TV support the Internet via a router?

In tradition, a standard TV receives analog and digital signal via an avtenna or a satellite to process and display what a user sees. For a smart TV, it needs a network cable or a WIFI router to download the necessary resources so it can decode and display what a user sees. The router, which acts as a network distributor at home, is an important device to support any other smart devices(phone, tablets, smart TVs, etc..) for network connection. When you click a “play” button on a youtube video, your smart TV will send a request through router-modem to the youtube server. On the contrary, once the youtube server gets the request from your smart tv, then it gives a response with the video files as content tracing as modem-router-tv. 
For example, an OPEE Smart TV built-in with a Android OS 12 has some apps such as Netflix. Without a WIFI hosted by a router, then these apps would not work.

2. How much network bandwith does a smart TV need?

The answer to this question would be flexible due to different situation. Support you have a 6-people-family where each family member has their own phone, or perhaps some of them have laptops. The average number of smart devices would be 8+ in this family. These devices, adding with the smart tv, would be sharing the same network and same router. In a modern life, a 4G network is enough for a single device to surf the Internet and the 4G network ranges from 10-100Mbps(1.5M/s to 10M/s). For a family, a 100Mbps(10M/s) network plan would be a start-up. However, if you are using a 4k TV, then a 100Mbps(10M/s) is not enough to smoothly play a 4k movie. On Average, a 4k video(1hr) is about 20GB. Let’s do a dum calculation. 

20GB = 20000 MB -> 2000MB / 3600 second ≈ 55 M/s  | For a 4K video.

As a result, it is best to have a good network to support your 4k applications on the smart TV.

3. A Simple and fast way to troubleshoot whether the router is too old

Suppose you recently own a 4k TV and you decide to play a 4k Video via youtube. You find the video is slow because of the download speed, so you upgrade the carrier plan for a better download bandwith. However, you find that there are no expected result. The issue probably comes from the router.

Quick way: Connect to the WIFI with your phone and test the phone beside the router. Open one of “Speed Test” websites. If the download speed does not match your carrier plan, then the router is not fitting the bandwith coming from the carrier plan.

4. What router should you use?

Always buy a router above your recent need, in case you need to upgrade it in the future. Look up at the package of the router first. There would be some numbers highted as 100Mbps or 1000Mbps. This is the max bandwith of this router. Remember, you need to choose the bandwith that fits your carrier plan, in order to truly maximized the usage of your total bandwith.
On the other hand, be aware of the 2.4G and 5G WIFI. 5G WIFI is stronger than 2.4G wifi, but the signal from a 5G WIFI will significantly decrease through a wall. Fortunately, some routers support a flexible WIFI mode, it will help your devices pick the right network band(2.4G/5G) for the best performance.

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