I moved into a new apartment with 4 other people on April 1.
After some recent internet issues (all of which have occurred when I was not even playing poker) a couple of the roommates have started asking me if my poker playing may affect the internet (in general). They have not stated any specific theory or idea about how or why this might be the case. We have two different Wifi networks running and I'm accessing the router for one of them via Ethernet. I play a mix of Ignition Casino and Global Poker, multitabling up to 8 tables.

I told them the graphics for online poker are comically poor so it should use much less bandwidth than other activities such as streaming, Netflix, etc. I said I would look into if there's some way to see in real time the respective bandwidth usages of all the devices connected to a network. Is this possible? Any other comments that might be relevant? Thanks!

Poker uses almost no bandwidth. I tether my laptop using my phones 4g sometimes, uses maybe 30mb/hour. Streaming Netflix or whatever is ~1gb/hour.

Netflix in particular can be a bandwidth hog on slow connections, it seems to download at max speed in bursts.

Depending what router you've got there might be options to share bandwidth between devices, you can allocate each device a max speed.

Could also ask anyone streaming to turn down quality settings, think you can do it on Netflix if you log in to the website.

Everything that The Imp said is very right. Poker uses a literally trivial amount of bandwidth - they're not sending you pictures of cards every time, they're sending (an encrypted version) of just "4 Clubs" or whatever.

If you have a modern and fancy router, it might tell you what is using your bandwidth (if, in fact, that is the problem - I am not convinced that this is the case).

Thanks guys. Good to know this info if/when it comes up again in the future.