4x PCs on Linksys router/switch - what happens to bandwidth ?

[Dolby]

Hi,

I'm new at this, so excuse the question. I had a Home384 installed this week and bought a Linksys router/modem with 4 x ethernet ports. Hypothetically, what happens if I have a PC on each ?

Do I get 384/4 = 96bbps each ? Is this always, or only when all four are running at the same time ? What if one PC is on MIRC and another browsing, does it 'take what it needs' for MIRC (very little) ? What if only one runs, and the other three are idling ? Or off ?

 

[Random717]

i've got 2 pc's on one router, if one is idle the other downloads at 40kb/s, if they are both downloading it averages out at 20kb/s.. it gets more random if one pc has 3 downloads going and the other only has 1, but each pc always tries to speed up to use the maximum available bandwidth.
With IRC i get a bit of lag when the other pc is downloading at 39-40kb/s.

 

[BobJones]

It's a series of Tubes!

Lets use a simple analogy....
You have a tube coming into your house that can deliver 384 drops of stuff per second.

At the end of your tube you attach a distributor with four outlet tubes. Each of the four outlet tubes is capable of delivering much more than 384 drops of stuff per second, but that doesn't matter... there is only 384 drops of stuff being fed to the distributor (your router in this analogy).
So when only one of the four outlet tubes is being used, it is capable of delivering all 384 drops of stuff that is coming into your house thru the main tube thru the outlet tube in use. This means that when someone else wants to use one of the three remaining outlet tubes, there is no stuff to go their way.
Similarly if the person at outlet tube no 1 is only using 84 drops of stuff per second, there will be 300 drops of stuff per second to share between the remaining three outlet tubes....

Make any sense....

 

[Person]

Each pc would use what it needs (or as much as it can use at the time) If you run two of the same download from two different PC's their downloads should run at the same speed. If one program uses less Bandwidth then the other PCs have more bandwidth avail to use.

 

[Person]

There is a program called net limiter, that will allow you to limit the amount of bandwidth that can be used by an IP address