How are they able to support thousands of users at one time? I do a speed test and they aren’t like fiber optics level of speeds so how can they have so many users at one time? Is it because there are so many routers placed around the area? But even when I’m on campus I don’t see any wireless routers outside.
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There aren’t routers placed all over the place but you are close.
Those are access points. Their only goal is to connect people to the wifi. Then the reason they are able to get so much bandwidth is segmentation. Those access points aren’t all hooked up to a single location. They are going to be hooking up to several network switches throughout the school. Then those network switches will have an extremely high speed connection back to “the core”
Then the core is likely connected to redundant internet connections. When I did networking for my college they had three separate providers, one for a specific project for a single building but then the other two they had one maining as business and staff traffic and one for student traffic where if one failed the traffic on the failed connection would fail over to the backup connection. They are also paying for much higher bandwidth than you can find for home use. Business connections have much higher data rates than home connections so you may be looking at 100Gb where a home connection, depending on where you live, may cap out at just 1 or 1.5Gb.
So your phone is connecting to the access point with say 20 other people and hitting a 100Mb connection. Then it hits the switch and suddenly there’s 400 peoples data hitting the switch but that’s okay because the switch is communicating to the core with a 10Gb connection. Then your data hits the core and it’s competing with 4000 peoples data. That’s okay though because it’s being sent to the Internet Service Provider (ISP) with only half of those peoples data on a 100Gb connection.
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