Wireless network question

elliebean_2

Can somebody tell me please - if you have a wireless network set up at home, does the number of laptops/PCs accessing the internet on it at any one time significantly affect the speed?

TIA

albertross_2

the bandwidth is shared, so it could do if you were all downloading flat out using bittorrent etc, but for general surfing you won't notice it, because most of your time is spent reading the page.

superscaper

As albertross says, there is a specific size to the bandwidth and it depends on how that is shared, if more people require more bandwidth each, eg someone watching video and someone else downloading a file at the same time then you will notice a difference.

Mattjimf

It depends on what all the computers are doing. If you are downloading on a few computers, playing online games or using streaming media you will notice the speed will be affected as they will all be trying to use the same bandwidth, if you are just browsing the internet the speed shouldn't be affected too adversly.

espresso

Obviously it depends on your connection speed i.e. it would be far more noticeable sharing a 512Kb connection between several users than sharing a 5Mb connection.

elliebean_2

Thanks for all your replies. Our current broadband speed is 1MB and it'd be mainly for browsing the net, occasionally downloading music files but not much more. Sounds like it won't make a dramatic difference.

albertross_2

Whatever you get, make sure you encrypt it with wpa..