Six years ago, I nearly got my ISP to upgrade our fibre connection to 1Gbps. As I said at the time: This is a curmudgeonly post which is going to look ridiculously outdated in a few years. What's the point of Gigabit broadband? Well, it's a few years later and Virgin Media have just given me their Gig1 package for £30 per month. Nice! With all the inflation related price rises, it's great to …
if it takes multiple hours, streaming services and video calls could be lagging while the download is going. it becomes more meaningful when you are not living alone
That’s where traffic priorisation comes in. If your router is setup in a somewhat reasonable way it gives priority to smaller data streams to avoid just that.
most routers are way too underpowered for that. you are happy if yours has 128 MB of RAM and 64 MB storage, and then you can imagine how is it with their CPU.
Actually, no. That’s a very simple basic functionality. A router needs to identify the streams (identified by the 5-tuple of source and destination IP and port and the protocol) to work at all. It also needs to prioritise traffic to work at all.
Combining both features is trivial even on 128mb RAM, and it’s implemented in most routers.