Does 100mbps speed equal 100mbps bandwidth?
On 8/9/2016 at 1:14 AM, BeatTheFreak said:My school has a connection of 100mbps and when I download a file I get that full speed, even if there are hundreds of people on the network. So, a Verizon spokesperson called me and told me about the network speeds I could get at my home. He said 50mbps is good for 3 devices and 100mbps is good for 7 devices. This makes no sense to me. If my school and my house get 100mbps and even if there are tens or even hundreds of devices I always get that exact same speed when downloading files (the full 100mbps). So, why are they saying that 100mbps is good for 7 devices when other places have way more the 7 devices and everyone still gets that 100mbps speed? What if I have 200 devices would I pay for 100gbps (I don't even think that's a thing)?
Lots of people here give you bad answers, or incomplete answers.
There's no such thing as 50mbps for 3 devices and 100 mbps good for 7 devices. That's just something their marketing department made up to trick people into buying the more expensive 100 mbps plans. There is no correlation between the number of computers or devices (phones, tablets, internet connected TV or consoles) and the internet plan.
There is however a seed of truth behind what they say, and it's mostly related to how your internet connection will behave if you're using the internet connection heavily on several devices at the same time. As an example, let's say that your mom watches Netflix in her room (which is streaming with 8-10 mbps), you're watching a Youtube video at 8-10 mbps and your brother is downloading some playstation/xbox game patches with 20 mbps ... the router or cable modem you have in your house will divide those 50 mbps as even as possible between the 3 devices and everyone will be happy. However, if you had more devices playing Youtube videos or Netflix, each device may get less than 8-10 mbps needed to keep the video stream play smoothly and then you'll be unhappy, Youtube or Netflix would start to stutter and buffer, if someone in your house is playing an online game they may have higher pings/lag - that's partly why they recommend 100 mbps if there's more than 3 devices in your network.
It's up to you to determine if what you have in the house will behave like this, if you'll have often moments when most of your internet connected devices will use a lot of bandwidth. If it's going to happen extremely rarely, which is often the case, you would probably be fine with 50 mbps even if you have more than 3 devices in your home.
As for your first questions.
The internet connection goes into a modem or something which has several network jacks in the back (basically a network switch). All computers that connect to the back of that router are treated equally. If you have a 100 mbps plan and one the computers connected to the router starts to download from a website that's fast and can send the data to you at 100 mbps, that computer will receive the data at 100 mbps.
If another computer in your house starts to download data from a website, the router is smart enough to give each computer an amount of the internet connection and both will get reasonable speeds. The first computer will not slow down all the other computers in your house, its download speed will probably go down a bit to make room for the download belonging to the second computer.
Your school's internet plan is most likely slightly different than an internet plan you'll be able to buy at home.
First of all, the plan is probably for 1gbps (1000 mbps) and not 100 mbps, but the internet cable goes into a router (a computer or a dedicated box like a switch) and then it's probably connected to a few network switches.
The rooms in your school are probably each connected to those switches at a central location in your school using a 100 mbps connection. Therefore, if you're in a classroom and you download something, you get 100 mbps up to those switches, which are connected to the Internet using a 1000 mbps internet connection.
If two people in different classrooms would start to download something, each will have a 100 mbps connection to those switches, and then to the internet through that 1000 mbps connection.
If two people in the same classroom start to download something, they'll probably be limited by the connection between the classroom and the switches, which is probably 100 mbps.
Also, schools and universities often employ transparent proxy servers. Imagine a fast computer connected to those switches in the school with a 1000 mbps connection, so this computer can download from the internet with up to 1000 mbps and can send data to people in the school at up to 1000 mbps.
This fast computer just sits there and listens to what people access on the internet, the websites they visit and the downloads they start. When a download is started, this computer simply checks if that file was already downloaded by someone else and if that's the case it reads the file from the hard drive and sends it to the person requesting it instead of downloading the file from the remote website. If the computer doesn't find the file locally, it downloads it and at the same time it sends it to the computer that requested it inside the school, and next time someone wants the file it's stored on the computers' hard drive.
You as a regular user don't know if you downloaded the file from the remote website or from the computer inside your school, it can be completely transparent to you.
This is often done at LAN parties , see this article as an example.
You should also keep in mind that the internet plans of schools are often "special" - the schools receive IP addresses from a special range reserved for business or educational customers, and the data traffic is sometimes going through separate fiber optics cables, so the school's internet connection is less likely to be slowed down. A regular home user shares a fiber optic connection with lots of people in his neighborhood and depending on time of day and other people's behavior, the people around you may use a large amount of the bandwidth available on the fiber cable coming to your neighborhood.
Also, some schools and universities are part of various education networks like GÉANT or HEAnet in Ireland for example (you can even see the connections this network has with other networks and locations here if you're curious) and lots of others - basically what this means that Verizon may have a deal or understanding so that when your school tries to connect to some kinds of websites (like websites belonging to educational or research websites of other countries), instead of sending and receiving the data through regular fiber optics owned by Verizon (which may be saturated with data from other customers of theirs), the data is routed through some of these separate high speed networks which often have more available bandwidth.
For example, if you'd try to download a file from your home connection from somewhere remote, Verizon may only have a 10 gbps optical fiber going to that remote location and lots of people like your may download stuff from websites in that remote location, so you get poor speeds. From your school however, you may get higher speeds because the moment Verizon receives the requests in their center, it routes your requests through one of these private networks which may have 25-40 gbps of bandwidth to that remote location, and which is used by fewer people. So from school you'd get faster downloads.
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