It creeps up on you. A phone each, a laptop each, the work laptop that's separate from the personal one. Two TVs. A PlayStation. The printer nobody uses but that's still connected. A robot vacuum. Three or four cameras around the property. A video doorbell. The geyser controller the plumber installed. A smart plug on the aquarium heater. A pair of speakers. Someone's old iPad from 2016 living in a drawer, still waking up every few minutes to check for mail.
None of these felt like a decision at the time. But your router is doing something quite different to what it was doing five years ago, and most people are still running the same box the ISP handed them when the fibre went in.
Wi-Fi takes turns. That's the whole problem.
Your fibre line is a pipe. More megabits, more water. Easy to picture, and that's why everyone thinks in those terms.
Wi-Fi doesn't work like that at all. It's closer to a room full of people who've agreed that only one person talks at a time. Your router speaks, then listens, then the phone speaks, then the TV, then the doorbell. It happens thousands of times a second, so it feels simultaneous. But it isn't. Every device on your network is waiting its turn for a slice of airtime.
Which means the thing that hurts you isn't how much data a device uses. It's how long that device takes to say what it has to say. A modern phone grabs its slot, transfers at high speed, and gets out of the way in a fraction of the time. An eight-year-old tablet on an old standard holds the floor for ages to move the same amount of data — and while it's talking, nothing else can. One slow device genuinely does drag down everything around it. That old iPad in the drawer is costing you more than the 4K stream in the lounge.
Cameras are their own category. A camera is not idle. It's uploading, constantly, in the direction most South African connections are weakest — up. Four cameras on a 100/50 fibre line will chew through your upload while you're trying to get a word in on a Teams call, and neither your ISP nor your camera installer is going to mention that to you.
Two lanes, and everything piling into the slow one
Almost every router broadcasts on two frequencies. 2.4GHz travels further and gets through walls better, but it's slow and it's crowded — your neighbours are on it, and so is your microwave and your Bluetooth. 5GHz is much faster but doesn't like brick.
Most cheap smart devices only support 2.4GHz. So all the cameras, plugs, sensors and controllers pile into the slow lane, and then your laptop drifts into that same lane because it wandered to the far end of the house and the signal looked stronger there. Now your work call is queueing behind a smart plug.
A decent mesh system handles this without you thinking about it. Plume watches which device is on which band, which pod it's nearest, and how much airtime everything is consuming, and it moves things around continuously. It also takes about 36 hours after installation to properly learn your home before it settles — which is why I always tell people not to judge it on day one.
What to do this weekend
Open whatever app manages your network and actually read the device list. Not a glance — read it. You'll find things you forgot you owned, and usually one or two you can't place at all, which is worth chasing down on its own.
Then unplug what you don't use. The printer that's been replaced, the tablet nobody's touched since lockdown, the speaker in the spare room. Every one of those is still negotiating with your router at intervals, for no benefit to anybody.
Put your cameras and smart devices on their own network if your system allows it. It keeps their chatter away from the devices you care about, and it's better for security anyway — a R300 camera from an unknown brand shouldn't be sitting on the same network as the laptop you bank on.
And be honest about whether one router in the hallway can still serve a house with thirty devices in it. Upgrading your fibre package won't fix an airtime problem. More megabits into a network that can't organise itself just gives you a faster queue.
If you're not sure what's going on inside your own network, send us a message. Half the time the fix costs nothing at all — it's just knowing what to switch off.