Andrew S. Tanenbaum (OS) Edition 4 Exercise 5 Question 51 (Page No. 434)

Question

It has been observed that a thin-client system works well with a $1$-Mbps network in a test. Are any problems likely in a multiuser situation? (Hint: Consider a large number of users watching a scheduled TV show and the same number of users browsing the World Wide Web.)

Answer 1

It is given that the bandwidth is shared.

$\therefore100$ users which are requesting data concurrently will get effective speed $= 10-\text{kbps}$

By having a shared network, we can multicast a TV program, therefore the video packets are broadcasted only once.

With $100$ users which are browsing the internet, each of one user will receive $\frac{1}{100} ^{\mathrm {th}}$ of the bandwidth. This can degrade the performance very quickly.