There are quite a few technologies around to connect your home to the Internet and they are continually evolving. The main ones are:
Here in the UK, ADSL is still very common, especially in rural areas. Typical download speeds vary from less than 1Mbps to about 24Mbps. Upload speeds are much less because of the inherent asymetry in this technology. The main problem with ADSL is that your Internet connection speed depends on how far away you are from the telephone exchange and the quality of the line between it and your home.
FTTC removes the main limitations of ADSL but still involves the use of older cables into your home. Typical speeds are from 20Mbps to 100Mbps (download) but upload speeds are usally limited to a lot less.
FTTP removes the limitation of the copper cables by introducing fibre all the way into your home. Typical speeds are up to 330Mbps here in the UK.
How much speed the smart home requires depends very much on what smart home features and services you are using. Most smart home applications are actually quite low bandwidth. The real benefits from faster Internet connections are often the lower latency and the resulting improvements in the user experience.
The main need for high speed Internet connections comes from video streaming. This can be due to security cameras or entertainment services. Streaming video to cloud services or from the numerous video streaming services (BT TV, Netflix, YouTube, Amazon, etc.) will be the biggest use of bandwidth in most smart homes, especially if watching in high definition (4K HDR, etc.).
One of the things we see most often in online forums and on social media is people complaining about slow Wi-Fi in their home and how an Internet speed testing service is giving really poor results. Many people fail to make the distinction between their Internet connection and their Wi-Fi connection and don't realise that they are two separate sections of network.
The only way to accurately test the speed of your Wi-Fi is to use a tool like iPerf in your home. To use this tool, you must run the iPerf server on a high spec PC with a wired, Gigabit Ethernet connection to your home router, to ensure this doesn't affect your results. You then run an suitable client app on your wireless test device, to get a measure of bandwidth available over Wi-Fi.
These test also assume that your Wi-Fi is not subject to external interference and is not being used by lots of other devices. Wi-Fi is a shared resource and other connected client devices may reduce the speeds achieved. In practice, it is very hard to achieve the same ideal conditions in your home, that manufacturers of hardware use to achieve their quoted performance figures.
Many people don't realise that most mobile devices actually have hardware limitations that restrict the maximum speed they can transfer data over Wi-Fi. The processor and Wi-Fi chipsets used will be the main limitation. By way of example, an Apple iPhone 4 is incapable of sending data over Wi-Fi any faster than 19Mbps. An iPhone 6 supports maximum speeds of up to 220Mbps and an iPhone 7 about 450Mbs. Older devices tend to be much slower than the latest ones.
The Wi-Fi access point hardware being used in the home will also be a big factor in limiting Wi-Fi speeds. Many ISP routers are built to be cheap and contain hardware that may limit the speeds achievable. If you are also using repeaters, extenders and even mesh Wi-Fi, this will introduce extra hardware that can slow down Wi-Fi speeds.
The only accurate and reliable way to therefore test the speed of your Internet connection is to run a speed test from the same high-spec PC connected to your home router with a wired, Gigabit Ethernet connection. And even then, there may be factors such as contention in the network and remote server load that will affect the speed test results. Running Internet speed tests on mobile devices connected via Wi-Fi, will only ever be indicative and the result will often be compromised by other factors in your home.
