just brew it! wrote:It should not be possible for one site to block WiFi access from other devices. When you say blocked, do you mean WiFi seems to be completely dead from other devices, or just really slow?
The only two possibilities that come to mind are:
1. The site is a bandwidth pig, and is chewing up all your available bandwidth.
2. The site is misbehaving in some other, more subtle way (e.g. opening an unusually large number of simultaneous TCP streams), which is triggering a bug in your WiFi router's firmware.
I was thinking one possibility could be some sort of bizarro-VPN setup that is misrouting traffic over your LAN. The thing is, while I've seen VPNs mess up the use of applications on a single computer, I've never seen it cripple third-party devices. For example, due to NATed IP address space collisions, I've seen situations where a web browser on your computer can't go to regular websites when the VPN is turned on because even the normal non-VPN traffic routes go through the VPN (and gets lost) instead of going to the real gateway. However, another computer on the same LAN would still go out to the Internet fine.
Other than that, I'd lean toward the resource exhaustion scenario that JBI described. Even a high-bandwidth service usually has enough slack to let other devices on the network have some opportunity to download data. If, however, your router has no additional resources to perform NAT translation or other operations, then your packets will get dropped instead of just being sent at a slower rate.