Eli5: Why multiple people using same wifi slows it down
In: Technology
When you take a hot shower in a hotel, the water heater pumps hot water to your hotel room bathroom. No problem. Now imagine 100 people in the hotel all take a hot shower at the same time. The water heater now has to create and supply 100x as much hot water. Everyone gets hot water eventually but it may take longer to heat up and the water heater might not be able to keep up.
The WiFi can only handle so much information. Multiple people using it at once means it has to handle a lot more information, meaning it can’t do it as quickly
Does your full of water sink drain of all at once when you pull the plug?
wifi works kind of like people talking and hearing.
If it’s just you and one person, pretty easy to talk back and forth.
If there are 30 people in the room, suddenly it’s hard to have a conversation. Similar thing happens with wifi. Without going too far into the technology, the way internet communications work, they’re not very good at being fast in “noisy rooms” so to speak.
Let’s say you want five people to stand on a box that’s three feet wide.
One- easy!
Two- not to easy…
Three- they have to get creative.
Four- super hard
Five- extra super hard
The box is called bandwidth.
Some people have really wide boxes, others don’t. The more people you want on the box, the harder it will be to have everyone on the box and not have anyone fall off.
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