Probably a very basic question but confused the hell out of me - say if I have 100mb internet at home, and scenario one, a router with 100mb port speed and I connect two PCs to it, each has a 100mb NIC card, is it true that ignoring other factors I should be able to get close to, if not 100mb connection on each of the PCs? On the other hand, scenario 2, if I have a (unmanaged) switch and I connect the PCs to the switch I would only ended up getting 50mb each on each of the PCs (i.e., the switch essentially “halved” my internet speed if I connect 2 PCs to it, 1/3 if I connect 3 PCs to it, etc)?
You have one pipeline to the Internet that is 100 Mbps wide and it doesn’t matter if you put the split of this bandwidth in your router or your switch. At some point all your systems will have to share this 100 Mbps between them.
And this shares are dynamic. If one device currently only uses 10 Mbps, the remaining 90 are free to be used by all the other devices. (highly simplified)
And actually, if your router has more then one lan port, chances are high that this is a switch within your router.