Bill Gates, of course, has a notorious (and possibly spurious https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#Misattributed) quote about nobody ever possibly needing more than 640K of RAM. Yet today, quite a number of apps on my phone take more than that, for program and for data each.
Capability expands to fill resources. And for us at home right now, it's something a bit higher tech: WiFi ports.
We've had a WiFi router for some years now. Even bought a replacement one a year or two back. And, like then, it had 6 "wired" ports and 10 "wireless" ports. Obviously, I thought, more than we'd ever possibly need, but I didn't want to go to the next tier down and feel resource constrained.
You know what's coming.
We now (as I discovered yesterday) well exceed 10 potential devices, just in our household, that use WiFi to talk to each other or the Intertubes.
– 3 home computers
– 2 work laptops
– 1 printer
– 3 Android phones, with 1 work iPhone on its way
– 2 tablets
– 1 Chromecast
– and, now 1 Nest
Right there are 14 WiFi devices. And I have no doubt that a new fridge or sprinker control box or desk lamp is going to have some incredibly nifty feature that uses one. And that assumes that no friends or family swing by for the evening or week and want their phone / tablet / laptop to hook up.
It's not the bandwidth, just the number of connections. And the Netgear router doesn't seem to be handling it all too well. We keep having devices temporarily losing connections (more than we probably realize), for one thing. My guess is it's devices knocking the others off, and then getting back on.
So … maybe it's time to look at a larger router. Maybe a 20 port one will do the trick. We couldn't possibly ever need more than that …
Oh yeah? Wait until your refrigerator strikes up an office romance with your dishwasher!
@George – As long as they don’t leave a big wet spot on the floor, I’m okay with that …
That might be why we're having issues. We've got at least 10 wifi devices, and we have to reboot our router at least daily.
I remember my first IBM PC clone. It had a 30 MB hard drive that failed. I went back to the shop and they only had a 40 MB model, and I had to pay the difference. I was fuming over having to buy an additional 10 MB of storage that I could never possibly fill up!
I was just thinking the other day that in 2008, I had one device in my home that could connect to the internet (a laptop). Now, I have 12, not counting the DSL modem, the wifi base station or the switch. Seven of those are on wifi, five are wired. I wonder how many there will be in another 5 years.
P.S. If your wifi base station only supports ten devices at a time, that sounds like a good reason to upgrade. But you should also consider the bandwidth provided by your internet connection as a limiting factor.
Thing is, it's not like all the devices are streaming movies at the same time. There are peaks and valleys in the devices being actually used, while the rest just do occasional checks home for file sync and the like. So I really don't think bandwidth is the problem.
We do have some wired devices — the Blu-Ray, the femtocell — which really require the wire (and are faster that way), so that part isn't likely to go away until wireless Gigabit becomes more common.
The difficulty is in predicting the future, and figuring out which insanely high limits will soon be exceeded.
You probably remember the CB craze of the mid 1970s. In the midst of the craze, the FCC was getting a million license applications a month, and there was huge pressure to increase the number of channels from 23 to 40.
That increase took place in 1997, but you knew that it was only a matter of time before we would need 200 or 500 or 10,000 channels for CB communications…right?
Actually, by 1982 the new of applications for CB licenses had fallen to 30,000 a month, and the FCC unanimously decided to do away with the whole licensing scheme altogether, saving $400,000 a year.
http://www.nytimes.com/1982/12/05/us/end-to-cb-liscenses-proposed.html
+John E. Bredehoft True enough. One can see the same thing every day in businesses that fail from overexpanding.
this makes no sense whatsoever – a wifi router does not have a number of "wifi ports"
more likely, you have a limited DHCP scope, which is adjustable (*most*devices are set for 253 devices) OR you have a filing device OR you are still using something like 54g wireless.
+Benjamin Berry – You are correct. As I have researched this more, the limitation it appeared I had I don't have. I am still encountering the problem, though, which indicates I have a different problem to solve.
Some Wifi routers have only enough memory built in to allow 10 devices (e.g. some Apple Airport Express). I imagine that they might document that as a limit to 10 "ports" to try to make it understandable for the layman. It seems that this was more common when memory was more expensive. I could also imagine hat someone might try to artificially limit the number of connections in order to create differentiation between one device and a more expensive one. So, it's not completely ridiculous.
No, the problem was I was misinterpreting the attached devices display. I'm having problems, but it's not due to the "max numbers of connections".
Ah, good … I think 🙂
+David Newman Well, no, not really — it means that I can't just be assured I can fix it by buying a new router. I need to figure out what really is causing it, and if need to update the firmware, or change device settings, or sacrifice a chicken, or …
I vote for sacrificing a chicken, because that sounds like a good start to a nice chicken dinner! 🙂
I prefer to have the priests of the butcher shop do the actual sacrifice on my behalf, thanks.