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Is Your Broadband Child Proof, The Modern Child Can Kill A Connection!

One of the problems with living on a desolate rock in the middle of nowhere is the lack of choice when it comes to our services. Lack of choice and paying over the odds! For example I currently pay £30 a month for an ADSL connection that features a maximum of 2Mb download and 256k upload. I can't upgrade, it's that or nothing. Figures, schmigers you might say but if you're going to be getting laptops for your kids this Christmas you might need to give some serious thought to your broadband connection.

As your house expands from a 1 computer home to a 2 or 3 computer home you'll start to feel the strain on your internet connection. Especially with kids! I was doing some work last night from home and was noticing that it was taking me an age to sync up some files. What usually takes a couple of seconds was taking minutes. I knew my daughter was upstairs on the computer in her bedroom (ICU reports :) ) so I thought I'd pop my head in and see exactly what she had open. Her screen had more windows on show than the Empire State Building! There were at least 8 different MSN conversations on the go at once, 2 of which included a webcam. So she was sending 2 lots of webcam and receiving 2 lots. On top of her messenger chatting she was doing some homework, interactive video, of course you can't just have plain old written homework. Finally (besides the usual Googling) she had YouTube open and was streaming a movie "Just in the background".

In short she'd completely killed the internet connection from the house, and I've only got 1 daughter! I'd hate to think what it'd be like if we had more kids. If you're buying your kids computers just think on that for every computer you have then that's the possibility of having one more concurrent user. And with kids everything has to be about streaming video, music and whatever else that comes along. There is a new generation of web users where web pages are only any good for embedding videos. If you've got the option, it's well worth thinking about upgrading your internet connection speed as you start buying your kids their own computers(I wish I had that option!)

Besides being a bit of a whinge there is also a serious point to this. If you choose to use any child monitoring solution that doesn't require you to sit at your child's computer then the information has to be able to "get out". It doesn't matter if it's sending e-mails (such as ICU) or uploading to a paid web service if there's no bandwidth available it's going to at best slow things down a lot! At worst well, who knows...probably some crashing and hanging.

Of course instead of upgrading your connection you could always just tell them to not have so much open at once. That's certainly what I've tried but whether or not it will work only time will tell!