Can the number of connections on my 2ndary router slow down my internet access on my primary router?

I previously used a modem/router that Verizon mailed to us when we signed up as our sole internet hub, but I've been experiencing strange/intermittent/slow internet speeds (almost always around 1.0/0.35Mbps) whenever more than a couple of devices were connected. I'm paying for FiOS Quantum (50/35Mbps). Every device is connected wirelessly, except for one IP phone. It turns out that the household I'm in has a total of 23 wireless devices, of which around 10-14 of them are constantly on the network. It seems that one router could not practically handle all those connections

So I re-created my network to the following setup: basically, I have 2 routers (primary:A , secondary:B). Router A is the original FiOS router, while B is just an old router I found laying around. Router B's DHCP is disabled, and both routers operate on different wireless settings.

My question is, with this setup, if I direct half of the devices to Router A, and the other half to Router B, and if the users on router B each start heavily streaming from YouTube/Netflix/etc., will that affect the speed of the users on Router A?

Edit: Sorry, what I meant in my question was, when I only had 1 router, I would experience issues if there were too many concurrent connections. What would happen now if there are too many users on Router B? Would connections on Router A still be okay?

Edit2: Thanks for the answers, but after hearing them, I've dug around and found Do cheap routers overload easily when there are many devices connected to it, and how do I fix it? and Network for a large house, which my question may be a duplicate of. Feel free to close this question if needed.

richizy

Posted 2014-01-15T19:09:09.627

Reputation: 103

Answers

What joeqwerty said -- and also, most consumer routers are only built for a certain number of simultaneous connections. If anyone runs an application that spins up lots of connections (like BitTorrent) it'll quickly foul up every other connected device.

Xavier J

Posted 2014-01-15T19:09:09.627

Reputation: 640

So you're saying it's not the number of devices, but rather the number of connections each application is having at the moment, for each device? – richizy – 2014-01-15T21:25:19.213

Theoretically the number of devices shouldn't matter as long as they all have unique IP addresses. But in reality, the router has to keep a routing table of what IP address maps to what MAC address - this has to be stored in RAM. The manufacturers will try to keep costs down by putting in just enough RAM for the average situation in a household or small office. ... next comment ... – Xavier J – 2014-01-15T21:36:07.693

If you could manage to physically (or wirelessly) hook up a thousand devices to a home router by way of what'd probably be a room full of switches, it'd probably crash the software in the router. – Xavier J – 2014-01-15T21:37:36.603

Yes, because you still only have one connection to the internet, which all of the devices use, regardless of which router they're connected to.

joeqwerty

Posted 2014-01-15T19:09:09.627

Reputation: 5 259

Sorry, what I meant in my question was, when I only had 1 router, I would experience issues if there were too many concurrent connections. What would happen now if there are too many users on Router B? Would connections on Router A still be okay? – richizy – 2014-01-15T21:22:11.323

What type of issues are you specifically referring to? Are you talking about internet upload and download speeds? If so then yes, any device consuming your internet bandwidth can potentially cause issues for any other device trying to use that bandwidth. You only have one internet connection. All of the devices, regardless of which router they're connected to, use the same internet connection. If you're referring to peer to peer communication between devices then the answer is: it depends. – joeqwerty – 2014-01-15T21:27:32.210

In addition, each router supports a finite number of concurrent sessions. If a device on either router is consuming a large number of those sessions then it can have an impact on other devices. – joeqwerty – 2014-01-15T21:29:11.467