[quote=“tonygo”]If you make your ADSL modem wireless, how many wireless laptops can connect at the same time?
Same question for using a hub.
[/quote]
Most routers will support up to 253 clients, regardless of whether this is wired or wireless. As to how many can you hook up practically speaking, that depends more on usage than anything else. 1 client heavily into p2p can easily take over an entire connection making it useless for anything else. On the other hand if you juat have web browsing and emailing, you can support 10-20 computers on a good ADSL line without it getting too slow. If you do gaming or audio streaming then the answer will be somewhat lower.
(The 253 clients limit is because most routers use a /24 or Class C network for the LAN. This size network has 256 addresses, but 2 of these are reserved, and one is used for the router itself, so you end up with 253 usable. If you use a Linux box as your router you could use a larger sized network address for your LAN, although there’s little practical reason to do so on an ADSL line as you’d likely run out of bandwidth way before you run out of addresses.)