What does 500/500mbps internet actually mean?

Question

I know this may be a really noob question, but does 500mbps up & down mean I can successfully open 500 browser instances and allow 500 outgoing connections? To make it more simple, I want to know the maximum outgoing connections I can get from a 500mbps connection. Any input would be greatly appreciated. thanks.

Answer 1

What does Mbps mean?

Mbps is the amount of bandwidth you can transfer data at over your ISP's network. Think of it as lanes on a highway, the higher mbps (lanes) you have, the more data (cars) that can move on it at the same time without having to wait.

Mbps vs MBps

Also, data transfer over a network is measured in megaBITS, where data stored on disk is measured in megaBYTES. Mbps (lowercase 'b' = bits, uppercase 'B' = bytes). This can seem confusing but all it means is that there are 8 bits in every byte.

500/500mbps (megaBits per second) has a maximum transfer speed of approx 62.5 megaBytes in each direction. (500/8 = 62.5).

Maximum Number of Connections

Regarding your question of maximum number of connections, this plays no role in it. You can have virtually unlimited connections, depending on what your workstation can handle. If having too many browser tabs open is slowing your computer down, it is more likely your computer is out of free memory (RAM).

Answer 2

Bandwidth is a measure of data per second, not of individual connections.

It doesn't work the way you think it does because not every connection is equal in terms of data usage. Sending and receiving a ping request takes a minimal amount of bandwidth. Retrieving a simple webpage take a little more. Retrieving a complicated webpage with embedded ads and many graphics takes a lot more. Streaming a high-quality movie takes even more.

If you want to know how many of a particular kind of connection you can make over that pipe, figure out how much bandwidth that one connection is using.

Answer 3

500mbps up and down means that the maximum amount of traffic you can move across the connection (ignoring compression) is slightly less then 62.5 megabytes per second in each direction.

500 mbps has nothing to do with the maximum number of connections (the number of connections would be determined by the specs of your router and will be a large number). The key bit is that the available bandwidth - 500mbps will be divided by the number of connections you have open.

Note that there are other factors which come into play - including the distance between the connections and bandwidth available to those connections. Thus in order to make practical use of the full 500mbps you may find that the sites you are accessing need to be very close to you and well connected, or you need to access multiple sites simultanously -

Answer 4

As Radhil stated, different webpages take different amounts of data. Those rates mean that 500 mega bits per second coming in our out (assuming the network can handle that at the moment). If a web page is 500 mega bits in size, it will take a full second to download (plus a little bit for rendering it), making loading that web page take about 1 second. You can find out how much data by directing Chrome to chrome://net-internals/#bandwidth (copy and paste to the address bar) One thing to watch out for, often times during busy hours (everyone and their brother is streaming movies per se) the network won't quite be able to handle whatever your maximum speed is (say 80%??). You can use tools like http://www.speedtest.net/ to find out what your current upload and download speed is.

As far as maximum number of connections - if most of them are normal webpages, file uploads, or even ssh connections, its basically endless. The majority of webpages download content once, and even if they don't, if your sessions are trying to (collectively) download more than 500 megabits simultaneously, they will just move slower than if they were fully operating under 500 megabits per second.