Data-hungry devices devour home Wi-Fi

I occasionally lose the email connections on my two Samsung Galaxy S7 smartphones when they are connected to my home Wi-Fi network. The network has a Linksys EA7500 router and a Comcast internet connection, and serves the two phones, a PC and a 4K digital TV (another PC uses a wired connection to the router). Recently, the phones couldn’t connect to their email accounts, although the two PCs could. I rebooted the phones and again set up their email accounts, but it didn’t help. Later, the phones reconnected to email on their own. What’s wrong?

You have too many datahungry devices competing for too little internet capacity.

Streaming programs to your 4K TV is eating up most of the Wi-Fi bandwidth in your home. Your two PCs are consuming most of the remaining internet capacity, via either Wi-Fi or cable. That leaves little Wi-Fi capacity for two phones to download email, even though mail typically doesn’t contain much data.

You could either upgrade your Wi-Fi network, which can be expensive, or change the way you use your phones, which will cost little.

The easiest solution is to let the phones update their email through the cellular network instead of connecting them to your home Wi-Fi. The small amount of information in email downloads isn’t likely to overrun your phone data plan, and your Wi-Fi network will be free to perform its other tasks.