routers Can someone explain something about routers and internet speed?
Hmmm..... Try imagine it as a kind of road. This road is able to handle 15 trucks per minute to pass by.
Your computers are production plants which need resources very fast. So 1 of your computers needs 10 trucks per minute to work at full capacity. The other one only needs 5 trucks per minute.
The Router is some kind of intersection where they can pass and this one adapts itself so these 15 trucks per minute will be able to reach the computers.
Now a 3th computer is added and this one also requests 5 trucks per minute. While the router is still "big" enough and could handle these 20 trucks per minute, the road leading up to it can't and you will have a traffic jam and only 15 trucks per minute reaching your router which will devide it to the computers, in most cases this will be done equally (unless you use things like QoS).
But now say you have 1 computer manufacturing something which needs to be send to the seccond computer in the same network which then sends it to the third one which adds something too then you have something like this:
Computer 1 requests 10 trucks per minute from the OUTSIDE and sends 10 trucks per minute to computer 2
Computer 2 receives 10 trucks per minute form the INSIDE and sends 10 trucks per minute to computer 3
Computer 3 receivers 10 trucks per minute from the INSIDE and requests 5 trucks per minute from the OUSIDE
So in total there will be 10+10+10+5 = 35 trucks per minute going trough your router but only 15 per minute from the road, so that would still be okay because the router can handle up to 1500 trucks per minute.
Now things are a bit more complicated because you are using wifi and wifi is only half-duplex so it can only send or receiver but not at the same time, while the wired connection entering the router is full-duplex (I hope :P) so it can send and receive at the same time. But still in this example your router would be well equiped. Another difference is that I now only looked at traffic going into your router from the ouside, but you also send traffic to the outside and then you need your upload connection instead. most ISP's have something like 15 down and 2 up, so while you can receiver 15 mbit per second you can only send 2 mbit per second. In most cases this is no problem because most consumer use of the internet is based on receiver stuff and not sending. The only things you are sending are small requests to start sending you data.
Hope this clears it up a bit :).
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