Router advertised throughput.

admiraleddy24 · April 21, 2016

Is the router advertised throughput, for example 600mbps on the 2.4ghz range for a single device? Confused because i have 300 mbps Internet and several (20+) devices. Just wondering if they are all gonna be having that 600mbps throughput capability.

admiraleddy24 · April 21, 2016

Just now, admiraleddy24 said:

Is the router advertised throughput, for example 600mbps on the 2.4ghz range for a single device? Confused because i have 300 mbps Internet and several (20+) devices. Just wondering if they are all gonna be having that 600mbps throughput capability.

Or is it better to have more bands, and less speed on those bands for a theoretically even distribution of 300mbps internet on each of my devices.

EmeraldFlame · April 21, 2016

Real world bandwidth will be significantly lower. That 600Mbps would be under ideal conditions. Basically a perfect signal with only 1 device connected wirelessly.

When you're router has to talk to a bunch of devices what it will actually do is a round robin style communication. So it'll talk to one device for a fraction of a second, then move to the next and talk to it for a fraction of a second, then the next, and the next, until it looped back around to the first device again, and it just keeps doing that to keep traffic flowing to all devices, but it is only ever able to talk to 1 device at a time. Routers with multiple bands, for example a 2.4 and 5GHz, are able to talk to 1 device at a time per band, so one device can communicate on the 2.4 as the same time as the 5. These both still work in a round robin style, you just have 2 separate circles with different devices in them.

There are also some newer AC routers that are supporting a technology called MU-MIMO. You still don't see to many of them available, but MU-MIMO allows a single band to talk to 2 or 3 devices at a time, significantly reducing latency and making better use of the bandwidth available to it.

Hope that makes sense and helps you understand.