How many devices can be connected to a home wireless router at the same time?

How many devices can be connected to a home wireless router at the same time?

To connect mobile phones/computers to the router to access the Internet, they must obtain a local IP address assigned by the router. The router’s IP address is usually 192.168.1.1-192.168.1.254. By default, the last address and the first address of a network segment are Neither address can be used as a host address. The first address is used as a gateway in most cases, and the last address is used as a broadcast address. Among them, 192.168.1.1 is generally the management address of the router, which is the IP address assigned by the router to the device. There are only 256-2=254.

In other words, in theory, the router can assign up to 254 IP addresses to users, which means that it can support up to 254 devices connected to the Internet at the same time. If a secondary router is installed below the router, more secondary IP addresses can be allocated, and theoretically unlimited users can be used.

But this is just theoretical data. In real life, how many users can a wireless router connect at most?

According to router manufacturers, the average home router can connect about 10-40 wireless devices at the same time, which not only depends on the processing power of the router, but also on the bandwidth size.

However, the transmit power of a single router is limited, and the number of users that can be stably connected is also limited. For home-level wireless routers, popular wireless routers on the market can generally only support 15-20 devices for online use at the same time.

Exceeding this number will cause frequent disconnections or a serious drop in network speed. This has nothing to do with broadband, but is limited by the transmit power of the router. And if the connected user is a laptop with higher network requirements, the number of stable connections will be even less. .

In actual use, due to many factors, the actual number of connections of the router will not be so many.

Generally, the CPU and memory of home routers are not very high, which is equivalent to a low-configuration mobile phone. For example, some low-end routers only have 64M of memory, so every mobile phone connected to the router will occupy part of the memory. After connecting 10 mobile phones, it may be the limit, otherwise it may cause insufficient memory, making the connection difficult or even impossible.

In addition, the higher the network bandwidth, the larger the amount of data that needs to be processed, and the higher the memory requirements. If 10 mobile phones are connected to the router and run at full load at the same time, the router may experience network delays and packet loss due to insufficient hardware performance. So sometimes the WiFi signal is obviously full, but the network speed is very slow, so you need to check whether there are any devices that are “censoring the network”.

Routers are shared devices, and connected devices share the same bandwidth. If too many devices are connected, the network speed will be very slow.