I have a strange problem. So I have 2 computers at home, one desktop pc on which I like to game and one laptop that my girlfriend uses to watch TV shows. I have noticed that whenever the laptop gets turned on and a youtube video is opened the entire network slows down significantly. I have a 10Mbps broadband ADSL connection and the modem is an old TP=link wifi router/modem.
The router interface has QoS settings as well as bandwidth control settings however fiddling with these and setting them up did not really change the situation in any meaningful way. I should mention that the router is 10 years old and I got it when the internet was installed.
Eventually scouring the web for answers I came upon an app called NetCut. This is a home wifi monitoring and limiting tool and it actually works great however using this app I have noticed some unusual behaviour that I cant make sense of. I did a bunch of tests where I did broadband speed test 10 times and took the averages.
Test 1: All devices are disconnected except for the desktop. Speed test shows 10-12 Mbps. Ping is around 20 ms.
Test 2: The desktop is connected and the laptop is connected with a youtube video playing at 420p. Ping jumps to 400-500 ms and speed at 1-2 Mbps, sometimes even going below 1 Mbps.
Test 3: I use Netcut to limit the laptop bandwidth to 1 Mbps. Testing on the desktop, ping is back down to around 30 ms, but the bandwidth is now only 5 Mbps.
So I am limiting the laptops usage of bandwidth to 1 Mbps of a 10Mbps connection and I can CLEARLY SEE in the netcut interface that it is only using 1 Mbps but the desktop speed is still only 5 Mbps. Shouldnt it be 9 Mbps? WHere is the 4 Mbps that is missing going? I dont know anything about networking so is this some strange property that I just dont know about?
Thanks for the help.
