Now that thanks to some other Smart TV offer you have been able to get your first TV with 4K resolution, you are going to have to demand streaming applications that offer you UHD content to fully enjoy the panel of your new television. But, do you think that your internet connection is not enough to play these contents in the best way? Well, let us show you a simple trick to improve connection quality.
4K requirements
Unfortunately, it is not enough to buy a 4K Smart TV to start enjoying the best resolution. Unless you have a Blu-ray player and a large collection of movies, today the easiest way to access content in UHD resolution is to use streaming services. Netflix, HBO Max and Prime Video have a large number of movies and series in 4K format, however, for everything to work perfectly, you need an internet connection of at least 25 Mbps.
But one thing is the minimum and another is the optimal speed, which in these cases is the more the better. Assuming you have an internet connection of several megabytes, how can we get the most out of our connection so that the movies load as quickly as possible?
The bottleneck of Smart TVs
One detail that most Smart TV users may not know is that your TV is not taking full advantage of the Internet connection you have at home. On the one hand, WiFi connections are not stable or offer maximum performance, and on the other, when we connect our TV to the router via cable, we suffer from a problem that you might not be aware of: Ethernet speed.
Most Smart TVs on the market, including the most modern ones, mount a 10/100 ethernet connector, or what is the same, a standard that does not allow connections to exceed 100 Mbps. This implies that no matter how fast your home internet connection is, the maximum speed that will reach your television is that, so that a bottleneck is created that would not allow streaming applications to get the most out of them.
How do I know if Netflix is slow?
Within the platform itself there is a very simple connection test that you can run from your television to check what speed you are managing to achieve when downloading Netflix content. This test performs a series of tests with the different servers and, finally, a speed test to certify the speed that the application on your Smart TV is capable of achieving.
- To perform this test, you just have to do the following:
- Open the Netflix application on your Smart TV, go to the left column
- Select the "Get Help" option
- Select the Network check option and wait for the test to finish
The final result will allow you to know the connection speed that your Smart TV reaches, and in the case of using the TV's ethernet connection, most likely it will not exceed 100 Mbps (90,57 Mbps in our case). Is this enough to watch 4K? Yes. Could we improve the connection so that everything goes faster? Well too.
And it is that, with a higher speed, the 4K contents would load instantly, not having to wait those few seconds that, although they are scarce, would completely disappear with a Gigabit Ethernet connection. But the question is, is there a solution?
gigabit ethernet adapters
Well yes there is. The idea is none other than to offer the Smart TV a faster connection than the original, and for that we will use a usb ethernet adapter that allows gigabit connections. These USB connection adapters were born to offer cable connectivity to those laptops and devices that did not have a physical ethernet port, thus allowing the use of a cable to connect to the Internet.
Thanks to these USB adapters, we will be able to use a second port on our TV that did not exist before, and if we purchase one with a Gigabit Ethernet version, we will be able to achieve the jump in bandwidth speed that we are looking for. And it is that these adapters, unlike the Ethernet port that comes by default on Smart TVs, are capable of reaching speeds of up to 1.000 Mbps.
Some of the adapters that you should take into account are the following:
View offer on Amazon View offer on Amazon View offer on AmazonAll you have to do is buy one of these adapters and connect it to one of the USB ports on your Smart TV. You will not have to do anything, since the configuration is done automatically. We have been able to test these adapters on an LG with webOS and a Sony with Android TV without problems, however, a Samsung with Tizen has not been able to recognize the same adapter that we had used.
In the models that worked, we only had to connect the adapter so that the TV received an Internet connection immediately. In the system settings, within the network section, it appeared as if there was no connection (this section simply monitors the original network input and the integrated WiFi network), but all the applications worked perfectly.
With the adapter already connected, you just have to perform a new speed test from the Netflix application to confirm that the new Ethernet connection already offers a higher speed than before (269,57 Mbps), tripling in our case the speed that was originally achieved with the first ethernet connection. Ready!
Faster Netflix for less money
As you may have seen, this accessory greatly improves the Internet connection speed of our Smart TV, so in addition to enjoying much shorter connection times on Netflix, we will enjoy the same advantages in all kinds of applications that require a connection to the internet, including for example Plex, which is now capable of uploading files in 4K with a very high bitrate in a matter of seconds.
In this article you will find links that are part of the Amazon affiliate program. At no time have these links been suggested by any brand. They are all part of the editorial choice of the El Output team.