The modern home is filled with devices designed to make everyday life simpler and more efficient. Lights can be dimmed with a voice command. Locks can be secured from a phone. Thermostats learn daily patterns and adjust automatically. Speakers, cameras and appliances all connect to the same network to create what we now call the smart home.

But all of that technology depends on one foundation: WiFi. Without a strong and reliable network, connected devices slow down, drop offline or stop communicating with each other altogether. For homeowners who have invested in smart technology, the network becomes just as important as the devices themselves.

Remote work is no longer a temporary fix or a passing trend. For millions of professionals, it has become a permanent way of life. Meetings happen over video, files move back and forth through the cloud, and entire businesses are run from kitchen tables, spare bedrooms and converted dens. For that to work, home internet service has to shoulder more weight than ever before.

Anyone who’s had a screen freeze in the middle of a match or watched a stream buffer during a critical moment in online gameplay knows the frustration of unreliable WiFi. In gaming and streaming, milliseconds matter. Traditional home networks weren’t designed with that kind of demand in mind.

Most households still rely on a single router to push a signal through walls and floors. That works fine when you’re nearby, but a setup in the basement or an upstairs room can mean lag, buffering or even dropped connections. Add in the strain of multiple devices — phones, tablets, smart TVs, consoles — and the system starts to show its limits.

If you’ve ever walked from one room to another and watched your WiFi signal drop midstream, you’ve experienced the limits of traditional WiFi.

While older generations of WiFi were based around a single router in one corner of the house, mesh WiFi technology combines multiple, overlapping access points to blanket every room, so your video call in the kitchen is just as smooth as your streaming movie in the bedroom.

The internet connection running into your house is only as good as the signal you get once it’s inside. That last step — from fiber-optic cable to all your connected devices via WiFi — is often where speed gives way to dead zones and dropped calls.

But Connect WiFi, C Spire’s new managed home network service powered by the Amazon eero system, is closing the gap for good.

Wireless internet routers enabled us to free ourselves from ethernet and coax cables long ago. But as our need for more internet bandwidth has grown with each new convenience, our home networks have gotten more congested.

When you add up all the mobile phones, tablets and laptops floating around your home, then consider the cord-cutting streaming TV services and smart home IoT devices, it’s not hard to see why. Currently in the U.S., there are an average of 22 networked, or smart, devices in every household.