Gigabit Giggity Goo

I used to think my home Megabit ethernet was fine. I was able to send files from computer to computer ranging anywhere from 4 to 11 Megabits per second. That is, until I started a new IT job a few months back. I saw the difference. I liked it.

You have to be pretty serious about networking before even thinking about Gigabit in the home. Gigabit offers up to 1000Mbps bandwidth. Here are a few numbers to put things in perspective:

Wired Megabit (eg connecting a desktop to a router): 100Mbps
Wireless G (eg older laptop to a wireless router): 54Mbps
Wireless N (eg newer laptop to a wireless router): 300Mbps

DSL Broadband: Up to* 24Mbps
Fibre Optic: Up to 50Mbps

*Up to: most home users are only able to get up to 8Mbps (if that) on DSL thanks to BT's old copper cabling...
Also, note that these figures are all theoretical. I've yet to see a Wireless N device communicate at 300Mbps (37.5 Megabytes per second).

Looking at these figures, Megabit seems perfectly fine - internet speeds are far less, so Megabit is unlikely to ever be a bottleneck in the home... or is it?

If you're like me, and you have a lot of network devices, you've probably seen a little bit of strain on the network. If you have a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device you use for backups, you'll especially know what I'm talking about.

Even though Megabit routers are much faster than the average internet connection, start passing a lot of internal data through it (think transferring data from one PC to another), and even small webpages will start to have loading problems.

The cure? A faster switch. Now, this isn't to say that a Gigabit (or faster) switch won't have the same problems - but it will deal with it a lot better.

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I started by replacing the 4-port wireless Megabit modem/router (with multiple PCs connected to it) with a much simpler device - one DSL input, and one ethernet output.

I then connected this ethernet output into a 5-port Gigabit switch, which feeds the same multiple PCs as the old 4-port router did:

I then have a cable running up to my attic. I used to have a 16-port Megabit switch, but I replaced this with 2 Gigabit switches. I use the first one for high-priority devices (my PCs, NAS, Media Center PC etc), and then connected the other switch to it for use with print servers, non-priority PCs etc:

I have also connected a couple of Wireless-N routers (one is viewable, the other runs to another part of the house).

The final step is to then make sure that I've got my PCs equipped to make use of the Gigabit. In my new PCs, Gigabit comes as standard, but I had to purchase a couple of Gigabit cards for the older PCs in the house. Transfer Speeds went up from around 8Megabytes to around 100Megabytes per second (125MBps is the theoretical max).


To really finish it all off, I purchased a new NAS - a QNAP TS-210, with a 4TB capacity. I run 2 x 2TB drives in RAID1. No doubt there will be another post once I've become more familiar with it.

This lovely device is already set up to backup my entire family's documents/pictures/videos/outlook emails etc on a nightly basis (controlled client-side by QNAP's software).

Til next time.
Digiman Out.