[Mageia-discuss] About routers and switches and Mbit/s

[Marc Paré]

Hi Frank,

Le 2012-05-04 20:57, Frank Griffin a écrit :
> On 05/04/2012 05:49 PM, Marc Paré wrote:
>>
>> My ISP serves "downloads up to speeds of 6Mbps" ... I also realize the
>> if using DSL that is all depends on the location of the house and
>> telco hardware.
>
> There's your answer. 6M << 1000M, so in terms of what you can pull from
> the external internet, you won't see a difference.
>
>> All of our NIC's are gigabit NIC's.
>>
>> So would it be worthwhile to upgrade to gigabit router/switches.
>
> I don't know your setup, but if you use both routers and switches with 5
> systems, I'm guessing that the router and all of the wired systems
> connect through the switch (that's really all they need to see each
> other), and the router takes care of DHCP, wireless, and gating to the
> external net.
>
> In that case, it's probably worthwhile upgrading the switch to gigabit,
> as that will allow your internal systems to communicate at gigabit
> speeds. The router can stay as it is, since it can only push data to the
> ISP at 6M tops anyway, and its interaction with the internal systems is
> limited to brief DHCP exchanges.

I think I'll start upgrading the switches. We have a few switches 
throughout the house. It does make sense for my own sake as all my 
family members are getting their music served up from my computer. It is 
actually not a server, it's my desktop and it acts as the music-server. 
Anyway, I'll look into upgrading and try to get some more performance 
out of the network.

>
> Wireless is another issue. If the router is doing the wireless,
> upgrading to a good-quality n-level wireless router will give your
> wireless systems more parity with their wired brethren. Be careful of
> high-speed n-level routers that only deliver their top-rated speed if
> all of the wireless NICs come from the same vendor.
>

That's interesting to note; I recently bought a N-router but didn't see 
big gains in speed or distance. Maybe that is why. I was actually going 
to check to see if I could boost the signal a bit to get more reach -- I 
use a laptop on our patio but the signal can be troublesome at the best 
of times.

Cheers,

Marc