Does a router halve the signal or does the bandwidth stay the same on all ends?
Im planning on purchasing a router because of new computers and a ps3 and i was just wondering whether a router splits the signal with my excruciatingly slow 256 kbps bandwidth speed on both ends or does it halve it. So if i had two computers using the internet at the same time would i have 256 kbps on both computers or roughly 128 kbps on each?
Public Comments
1. well it wont halve exactly but it will share, for example if one is whatching a youtube vid it will suck up more that the other if its only say browsing text sites.if one is using it the other will not be able to use it for stuff like online gaming as ping will be terreible
2. A router does not halve or split the bandwidth. The bandwidth is still exactly the same.
The two computers will not have "roughly 128 kbps on each". They will each have access to the 256 kbps connection. How that bandwidth will split when both computers try to use it at the same time is not up to the router or the computers.
This is a very common misconception. Your 256 kbps bandwidth is how much data can arrive over your link to you. When the router gets a chunk of data, it figures out which computer it goes to, and sends it to that computer. It has no choices over bandwidth allocation, it can only forward on what it gets from your service provider.
So if you get fairness or don't, it has nothing to do with anything *your* router does. At your ISP's end, they have no idea which computer a packet of data will go to, since your router hides that information (all the ISP knows is that it goes to your router). So the ISP couldn't force a fair split even if they wanted to.
So if either computer is using the connection and the other is not, it will have the full use of the connection as if the other computer didn't exist. When they both try to use it, they will share it, but the sharing will not necessarily be fair, it will be somewhat random. (And some applications get a larger share than others. For example, a clustering downloader like BitTorrent will get a much larger share than, say, a YouTube video will.)
Fairness or controllable allocation was just never built into the system and aspects of the way the system was designed conspire to make doing that almost impossible.
