
Your bandwidth requirements also depend on the usage of the Internet your guests perform while being connected to your WiFi network. We can assume that only 20 of 43 can be connected or generate significant traffic at the same time. If each guest has 1.2 devices, you have around 43 devices in total. The hotel has 36 guests if it is fully-booked. If you want to estimate how many concurrent devices will be connected, consider, for example, a hotel with 18 rooms for 2 people each. Still, it is with the amount of traffic or bandwidth that can pass through the Internet router to your broadband service provider. In this case, the congestion isn’t necessarily with the wireless connections. All those devices share the same wireless network and the same Internet connection from your broadband service provider. Nevertheless, just because you can hypothetically connect 255 devices to a single WiFi router/access point doesn’t mean you should.Įach computer or device added to your network will degrade the bandwidth available to the other devices using the same connection.

The majority of mid-high end wireless access points and wireless routers can have 255 devices connected at a time. Indeed, speed refers to the rate at which data can be sent, while the definition of bandwidth is the capacity for that speed. The explanation of this misunderstanding can be, in part, due to their use in advertisements by ISPs that refer to speeds when they mean bandwidth. Bandwidth has the same meaning of capacity, and defines the data transfer rate.īandwidth, though, is not a measure of network speed.Īs a matter of fact, the words “bandwidth” and “speed” are often misused as synonymous. Network bandwidth is the capacity of a network communications link to transmit the maximum volume of data from one point to another over a computer network or Internet connection in a given amount of time, usually one second. The same action takes a few seconds instead if the connection is broadband, like the one with the optical fibers (over 1000 Gbps). For example, a low definition video lasting 15 seconds, weighing 1 Megabyte, can be downloaded from an Internet site on your computer in 3-5 minutes if the connection is made via modem (56 kbps) or ISDN line (from 64 to 128 kbps).

The unit of measurement is the bits per second (bps). The bandwidth determines, therefore, the number of bytes that can be transmitted on the connection. The basic unit of this language, the byte, is composed of 8 bits. During the transmission, the information is sent in a binary system, a language that encodes data using only two symbols (often defined as “1” and “0”, or “on” and “off”), each of which is called a bit. Bandwidth is the capacity of a channel to transmit data.
