Question

(VIC-RE’s new office has 7 PCs in the wired LAN with a 100 Mbps switch. It was suggested to the network administrator to replace the switch with a wireless Access Point (AP) that uses the 802.11ac standard and operates at 1 Gbps.

Assuming all PCs were simultaneously using the LAN, would the AP deliver faster or slower speeds to the employees? Explain your reasoning by including estimates of effective bandwidth for each case.)

This is the full question given to me by my professor

Answer 1

Solution: Yes, the speed of the network system would be affected in a negative manner as the speed of the switch would be decreased and hence it would be able to serve the employees at a very slow rate. This is due to the fact that the internet bandwidth or the band of frequency on which a network is communicating is actually shared among all the users that are connected to an access point and hence the bandwidth is affected due to a number of connections, this in turn actually reduces the speed of the internet for the people that are far away from the access point as compared to the people that are connected to the access point and are nearer to the system. This phenomenon takes place only due to this factor.

As far as the effective bandwidth for this network is concerned, then it is based upon the size of the message or the data packet that is being transmitted and the latency of the network system. In the case given above both of them are not given but still in the worst-case scenario, the illusion of the bandwidth that these users are going to get while connected to this access point is 1Gbps/7 so each and every user would only get 1/7th of the total bandwidth of the network system.

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