Internet while downloading.
Downloading anything seems to slow down the internet to where you can't even load a webpage.
For instance, I am trying to download a 700mb movie. On my connection, it should download in about 2 minutes. That's fine, it does that, but when I start the download, everyone in the house including me, can't load anything, the internet becomes basically useless when we are downloading something.
We have a 2wire 2700HGV-B2 router, and we have 2 wired PCs, 3 wireless laptops, and 1 ipod on the system.
March 19, 2011
1 Comment • Newest first
What you're experiencing is perfectly NORMAL.
Everyone in the house, and all the Internet applications on your computer all share the SAME "bandwidth" (Internet capacity). Downloading a video file puts a huge load on that bandwidth and it essentially "starves" everything else trying to use the same connection to the Internet.
It's like everyone in the school flushes the toilets all at the same time, and then you try to get a drink of water from a drinking fountain. You'll be lucky to get a trickle because everything shares the same "pipe" supplying the building with water. Your Internet connection works the same way.
If it's only a couple of minutes, then don't worry about it. It's normal and the speed will go back to normal for everything else when the download finishes.
Some routers have a special feature called "Quality of Service", or "QoS", which lets you assign priority levels to different computers or different applications. I don't know if your router has anything like that, but if it does, you could set it up so that the computer doing all the downloading gets a smaller portion of the total bandwidth. That would leave more for the other computers to use, but it would slow down the downloads.
The best way to find out if your router can do that, and how to set it up would be to find the user manual. Alternatively you could log into the router's settings page and poke around looking for anything that talks about "QoS".