[SOLVED] Will I limit my routers bandwidth?

Jan 13, 2022
3
0
10
Q: Would me downloading games cause my familys members connection to slow up since I’m using up a lot of resources from the router?

(I’m not the greatest at explaining thing so please bare with me)
Context: Ok so I recently just got a long ethernet cord for my house to plug in my PC to router since I live upstairs in our house. Before I using a wifi repeater and had an ethernet cable plugged into that. Now one of my family members works from home, and unfortunately they cannot use the wifi on their laptop since its broken and have to use ethernet. They work til the 7 and by that time I usually want to play some games, but I also download a lot of games. But I know that when games are downloading it uses the maximum amount of resources possible. And I remember sometimes that when I would download games upstairs, I couldn’t watch netflix on my firestick while waiting, because the bandwidth on the repeater was maxed and couldn’t spare anymore speed. So would that same thing happen with my PC but while plugged into the router? Would me downloading games cause my familys members connection to slow up since I’m using up a lot of resources from the router?
 
Solution
How much internet do you pay for from your Internet Service Provider, what plan do you have? 100mbps download, 300mbps download?

Short answer is yes, a gigabit ethernet cable can give you up to 1000mbps. If your internet plan is less than that, then yes you can fully saturate your internet download when updating or download a game on your console or PC. Once you saturate the download, without a good QOS system, everyone else will be at a crawl until your download is done.

If it's on PC, you can install bandwidth limiter software such as NETLIMITER to limit the bandwidth your computer uses. So if the internet plan is say 100mbps, you can limit your computers total download to 50mbps, which would give the rest of the house 50mbps...
How much internet do you pay for from your Internet Service Provider, what plan do you have? 100mbps download, 300mbps download?

Short answer is yes, a gigabit ethernet cable can give you up to 1000mbps. If your internet plan is less than that, then yes you can fully saturate your internet download when updating or download a game on your console or PC. Once you saturate the download, without a good QOS system, everyone else will be at a crawl until your download is done.

If it's on PC, you can install bandwidth limiter software such as NETLIMITER to limit the bandwidth your computer uses. So if the internet plan is say 100mbps, you can limit your computers total download to 50mbps, which would give the rest of the house 50mbps left.

For a more hardware solution, you can install a managed switch with bandwidth limits based on each port. So if you plug into say port 1, you can limit it to 50mbps. Then set it up so all the other ports get full speeds. So you can physically plug and unplug how much bandwidth to limit. Based on the user manual, I think this would be the cheapest managed switch with port based bandwidth control: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00N0OHEMA
 
Last edited:
Solution
Jan 13, 2022
3
0
10
How much internet do you pay for from your Internet Service Provider, what plan do you have? 100mbps download, 300mbps download?

Short answer is yes, a gigabit ethernet cable can give you up to 1000mbps. If your internet plan is less than that, then yes you can fully saturate your internet download when updating or download a game on your console or PC. Once you saturate the download, without a good QOS system, everyone else will be at a crawl until your download is done.

If it's on PC, you can install bandwidth limiter software such as NETLIMITER to limit the bandwidth your computer uses. So if the internet plan is say 100mbps, you can limit your computers total download to 50mbps, which would give the rest of the house 50mbps left.

For a more hardware solution, you can install a managed switch with bandwidth limits based on each port. So if you plug into say port 1, you can limit it to 50mbps. Then set it up so all the other ports get full speeds. So you can physically plug and unplug how much bandwidth to limit. Based on the user manual, I think this would be the cheapest managed switch with port based bandwidth control: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00N0OHEMA
We pay for a gigabit plan from Xfinity but from the speed test i ran on my computer it only gives me 600 or so mbps down. I looked it up and this seems to be a problem others have as well. If thats the case though and I can’t use up the 1000mbps anyway I don’t think it’ll give my family member any problems. Thank you for the information though, very helpful. If it does end up causing problems i’ll use a network limiter like you said.
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
We pay for a gigabit plan from Xfinity but from the speed test i ran on my computer it only gives me 600 or so mbps down. I looked it up and this seems to be a problem others have as well. If thats the case though and I can’t use up the 1000mbps anyway I don’t think it’ll give my family member any problems. Thank you for the information though, very helpful. If it does end up causing problems i’ll use a network limiter like you said.
Given a demonstrated 600mbps download performance, whatever game you are downloading or updating will not affect the rest of the users in the house.
 
We pay for a gigabit plan from Xfinity but from the speed test i ran on my computer it only gives me 600 or so mbps down. I looked it up and this seems to be a problem others have as well. If thats the case though and I can’t use up the 1000mbps anyway I don’t think it’ll give my family member any problems. Thank you for the information though, very helpful. If it does end up causing problems i’ll use a network limiter like you said.

This really depends. If you cable is the bottleneck, then you're fine. But if your router or other network hardware is limiting the connection, then you could still have a problem. If you pay for 1000mbps, but service is limited to 600mbps running up to your house, then you still have a problem and are saturating the internet.

What router do you have, is it docsis 3.0 or docsis 3.1?