Traffic shaping - Download speeds

[#1]

Does anyone know:
If several users are online on the same customer account, is each user allowed the maximum speed for their connection?
To clarify the question:
If one of my family is gaming (and using 2Mbps bandwidth) and I am using VPN (also 2Mbps maximum on my current 'Unlimited' product), can we each get 2Mbps or would we be allowed 2Mbps total?
What happens if different applications with different bandwidth limits are using the connection at the same time?
If I have 4 PCs connected and we are all gaming do we get 2Mbps total or 2Mbps each (would that depend on whether we are playing the same game or different ones?)?
This is clearly very hypothetical but I would just love to know the answer.
Thanks in advance for any enlightenment,
Alastair.
(No, I'm not really planning ways to beat the system ::))

[#2]

Every thin i say is assuming there is enough total bandwidth on your line ie your syncing well above 4000kbps

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If one of my family is gaming (and using 2Mbps bandwidth) and I am using VPN (also 2Mbps maximum on my current 'Unlimited' product), can we each get 2Mbps or would we be allowed 2Mbps total?

In that case yes the gaming gets 2mb and vpn get's 2mb meaning if both traffic types was maxed out your line you would be using 4mb in total

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If I have 4 PCs connected and we are all gaming do we get 2Mbps total or 2Mbps each (would that depend on whether we are playing the same game or different ones?)?

in this case all 4 pcs would be sharing the the 2mb rate limit meaning if they shared it equal they all get 500kbps each. the game's title has no bearing on it
Am only on a 2500-3000kbps line and havent had any problems runing two xboxs on unlimited, gaming is one of the less bandwidth intensive types of traffic.
When we are asked how much usage gaming uses we tend to qoute between 30-50mb an hour but all depends on the game being played

[#3]

Hi Walker,
It depends really on what is being used.  As Asbo says, just gaming on its own shouldn't cause your bandwidth to become saturated, however, P2P or high def streaming could potentially do so.

[#4]

I had noticed that downloading large files (Linux distros) did not seem to affect my son's gaming (or vice versa), running a speed test while downloading a couple of files, 2 kids gaming and wife on facebook (or similar 'waste of bandwdth') gave a surprisingly respectable result, this led me to wonder about the different trafic types and whether the so-called 'throttling' was actually quite kind to concurrent users on the same connection, it seems that it is.  Hence the post.
Thanks for the insight,
Alastair.

[#5]

Hi - reading this the bandwidth you get is basically on the line and not individual machines. So if you get a 4 meg connection that has to be shared between all the users on that connection. i.e. you don't all get a 4 meg connection as I think you were asking. Modern routers can determine the type of IP traffic and prioritise accordingly (May be refered to as QOS on the router settings somewhere). However, if several users on your network are downloading heavily it will have an impact on the performance of other traffic. I guess that the plusnet network will also traffic shape heavy downloads so in affect that will probably make some improvement on higher prioritised traffic such as gaming etc...

[#6]

That's exactly the way it works - all the computers on the connection share the available bandwidth, so you'll never get more than the 4mb total going through the line at once. However the higher priority traffic will go through first so you should still get decent pings when gaming even if someone is downloading linux iso's or whatever on the same connection.

[#7]

Thanks all for taking the time to reply, that clarifies things for me a bit.