You don't even need to set specific amounts of bandwidth usage for anything, as long as priorities are set correctly the router will limit the xboxs bandwidth as soon as something with higher priority is making a request.

Limit that god damn xbox to only have a certain amount of BW.

In any case, if two radios try and transmit at the same time there is likely to be a collision and one of htem "loses" and has to try again. IN an environment where an xbox is sending data constantly, a PC that sends intermittently is likely to "lose". Also note that the traffic coming back the other way (i.e. downstream) is now split between downloading web content to the PC and downloading game data packets to the xbox, although those two shouldn't collide with each other as the sending radio (the router) will serialize the data.. however it still may collide with the upstream xbox packets.. i honestly dont know enough about collision resolution and back-off on 802.11 networks.

Regarding A/B/G - A is the clear performance winner. As said elsewhere, G and B shared bandwidth and technology; the presence of a B radio greatly reduces the perfrmance of a G radio. Also, B/G share frequencies with many common cordless phones and even your microwave oven. A radios operate on a relatively unused frequency so are generally faster.

Finally, regarding hubs, switches, and routers...

The "collision domain" problem i describe above for wireless (the basic problem is, only one person can talk on the wire at once (per channel, i beleive.. so i was perhaps simplifying things a bit)) also applies to wired connetions. A hub is little more than an electrical mux where all the PCs are connected to each other. If 1 PC tries to transmit down the wire at the same time another PC does, there will be a collision and a backoff/retransmit.

the more transmitting devices on the hub, the more likely collisions will be and the lower observed performance you will see.

A switch makes this better by dynamically sizing the collision domains to the minimal set of involved machines. If you have 4 machines plugged into a switch, and Machine A is sending data to Machine B, and Machine C is sending data to machine D, and A-D are on different switch ports, all of this can happen without collisions. The reason for this is that the switch in this case acts like 2 hubs - A and B are connected together in one collision domain, and C and D are connected together, but AB traffic cannot affect CD traffic. The switch knows how to dynamically create mini-hubs because it keeps track of which MAC (the 48bit hardware address of each ethernet device) addresses are associated with each switch port. When traffic comes in it has a destination MAC address, and the switch knows exactly where to send that "packet". The switch operates at OSI Layer 2, closer to the actual electrical level.

So, think of a switch as a device that creates one or more "virtual hubs" (not to be confused with VLANs, which are another switch feature) between just the computers that are trying to talk with each other at that instant in time for each mutually exclusive computer-to-computer transmission.

A router is a layer 3 device, meaning it operates at the packet level and not so much the electrical/physical medium level. Packets are routed based on their ip address and knowing that a particular interface is the appropriate "next hop" for a particular address. Any device with two or more network interfaces is usually a router - the $50 "router" you buy at home has a WAN interface (cable or DSL), a LAN interface (whatever the included switch/router is) and sometimes a wireless interface (a "2nd" LAN interface), and moves traffic between all 3 at the IP layer, not the hardware layer.

(there is such a thing as an L2 switch, actually, but not in a $50 home product)

In any case -- plug the PC into the router with a long wire and see if it helps

tjamz wrote:
Ok...each port has the POTENTIAL of seeing the full bandwidth coming in. However, as soon a port 1 is using say 1.5 Mb on a 3Mb connection all that is remaining for available bandwidth on any of the remaining ports is 1.5Mb. In this case, if the xbox is sucking up 2.9Mb all that remains for the other ports is .1Mb

As for the Cat5 cord, I can hook you up with that shell....I've probably got a couple laying around my house right now that you can have for little or nothing

Correct.

As for the Cat5 cord, I can hook you up with that shell....I've probably got a couple laying around my house right now that you can have for little or nothing

PSiedTSi wrote:
Yeah, how does that equal the connection being divided?

Ok, enough whoring this thread. Either you need to learn how to explain what you are saying or you really need to go back to school.

lol. i know what im talking about, must just be coming out in a fashion that you guys arent understanding.

oh well.

BACK ON TOPIC. NO MORE BS BELOW THE LINE.

AnGeL. wrote:
Quoted from Webopedia:

"When a packet arrives at one port, it is copied to the other ports so that all segments of the LAN can see all packets."

AKA what i was describing

Nope. You were not describing that at all.

Ok, enough whoring this thread. Either you need to learn how to explain what you are saying or you really need to go back to school.

"When a packet arrives at one port, it is copied to the other ports so that all segments of the LAN can see all packets."

AKA what i was describing

AnGeL. wrote:
for a hub, it is true.

No, it is not.

PSiedTSi wrote:
That is not true either Joel.

for a hub, it is true.

where can i get a 50 ft cable?

Router = Advanced Switch