How the connected home is keeping us all connected

A few short weeks ago, the connected home meant something completely different. As we all respond to the urgent need to distance ourselves from each other, we’re relying on our connected home to be more than just a place where our devices are smart. Our home has become our connection to the world. Many of us have now come to rely on our home network as our link with friends and family, a way to get on with work, and a place to be entertained. As a group of people who set out to design an infrastructure to support the growth of smart homes, our first mission was to ensure Wi-Fi just worked. At the same time, we pledged to work with the entire industry - internet providers, device manufacturers, and service creators - to build a smarter future. Recently, the volume of data passing across all our home Wi-Fi networks has increased significantly. Part of the many important jobs Plume has is providing insights on patterns to our ISP partners. This information is already helping them plan for additional loads on their network, as well as giving communities valuable insight into the speed at which workers are moving to remote working. Because we manage over 700 million devices in our Plume Cloud we have some insights into how the recent COVID-19 outbreak has impacted home networks. We wanted to surface some of this data to help as many people as possible, so our Work From Home Dashboard visualizes a slice of that information: The number of work and learning-related devices connecting during work hours across 14 cities in the US.

We’ll keep updating the dashboard with new cities and devices and data visualizations as we crunch the numbers, and as more and more people look for information. Our job has always been to improve the smart home experience, and that has taken us on a journey from one test house in Menlo Park to more than 14 million homes around the world. Now, more than ever, we’re realizing how important the best possible smart home experience is to everyone around the world. We need to stay connected and, for the time being, the answer has led us to our connected home.