Whittie
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Registered: 11th Aug 06
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For something quite a distance from the router (30M of cat6)
Would you;
- Run 4 Cables up to where they'll be used, using all 4 ports on the back of a gigabit router.
- Run 1 cable up, and use a gigabit 4/5 port switch?
Just want the quickest most reliable connection. Cost doesn't matter, just want everything to work when it needs to, and be very stable.
Thank you..
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John
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Registered: 30th Jun 03
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Will you need 4 concurrent gigabit connections now or in the near future?
Both will be equally as reliable and stable, just that using 1 cable gives you a quarter of the potential bandwidth.
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Sam
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There shouldn't be any bandwidth degradation with switches.
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Whittie
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So if I run X, X, X & X all on port 1 of the router (through a switch), it'll have no difference, or lack of connection if I run X on port 1, X on port 2, X on port 3 & X on port 4?
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Dom
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quote: Originally posted by Whittie
- Run 4 Cables up to where they'll be used, using all 4 ports on the back of a gigabit router
- Run 1 cable up, and use a gigabit 4/5 port switch?
Second option is the easiest but you have a single point of failure in terms of connection to router and you could run into bandwidth issues if there is something else hanging off the routers (NAS box etc). First option seems a bit excessive.
Personally i'd run two lines from the router with one being a failsafe
[Edited on 10-06-2011 by Dom]
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Sam
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What you need is a 5 port switch. Port 1 or 5 normally connects to your existing router, leaving the other 4 ports available for other devices.
As long as you buy a gigabit switch with Cat6 cabling then all clients will be able to achieve speeds up to 1Gbit.
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John
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They'll only have 1 1gbit connection between the 2 switches (unless it's something fancy that's using something other than a normal port to connect the 2 switches) so a total of 1gbit shared between all 4, they wouldn't have 1gbit each.
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Rob_Quads
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The question you should be asking is.
Do you need every connection to have gigabit at the same time to the other side
If yes - then you will need to run lots of cables
If no - then run a single cable and use a switch on the end. That will still give you gigabit between the 4/5 machines but only combined gigabit to the remote system
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Sam
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OK I'm a bit confused here... If the network is full duplex, then surely in this case each client can transmit and receive at 1Gbit (as opposed to the old days when hubs were used instead of switches, and all clients had to share the bandwidth thus introducing packet collisions etc.)?
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John
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Between each other on the same switch yes.
To the second switch there would only be 1 gigabit port connecting them.
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VrsTurbo
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quote: Originally posted by Sam
OK I'm a bit confused here... If the network is full duplex, then surely in this case each client can transmit and receive at 1Gbit (as opposed to the old days when hubs were used instead of switches, and all clients had to share the bandwidth thus introducing packet collisions etc.)?
You cant have 4 1Gb connections going down a single Cat6 cable and they have full 1Gigabit throughput.
If that was the case you wouldnt bother with connecting switches with fibre.
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Sam
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Here is my understanding of it all...
If each PC is set up with 1GB ethernet (i.e. gigabit network cards, cat6 cables etc.) and the switch and broadband modem/router are all gigabit ethernet, then each PC whether connected to the switch or router will have a gigabit connection.
Switches simply direct ethernet frames to the intended destination (point to point broadcasting) rather than to every node on the network at the same time like what hubs used to do (multi point broadcasting).
A switch will offer the full bandwidth available (in this case, 1Gbit) because all frames are distributed from a queue, so it will offer the full 1Gbit bandwidth for each frame.
So if PC #1 is downloading a massive torrent and PC #2 is opening up a database on a file server, both will benefit from 1Gbit LAN connections - the bottleneck will be at the router end because your connection to the Internet will only be say 8Mbit or 0.08Gbit for example so if PC #2 wanted to browse the web at the same time as opening up the database then Internet access will be slow because of the WAN connection bandwidth being eaten up by PC #1 but the LAN connection to the server will be OK.
So in my opinion it would make no difference using 4 cables from the router to each PC because you will still always have a bottleneck somewhere (i.e. Internet connection).
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John
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You'd have a bottleneck between the 2 switches.
You can't have unlimited bandwidth, the 1 cable between the switches can carry a maximum of 1gbit.
This is why some switches have uplink ports that can for instance carry 40gbit over a very short cable run, or fibre interconnects.
[Edited on 11-06-2011 by John]
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Sam
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Yeah I know it won't have unlimited bandwidth, I guess all I was trying to say was that each frame sent/received would be a maximum of 1Gbit as obviously each node/PC would take it in turn to transmit/receive data from a buffered queue rather than all at the same time kinda thing.
Edit: I guess a switch with fibre uplink would be the ultimate solution, thus eliminating any potential bottleneck between switch and router if everyone was downloading porn at the same time for example
[Edited on 11-06-2011 by Sam]
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moka
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It depends if any other physical device is connected to the router that the devices connected to the switch might need to access or visa versa. If not, internet bandwidth is much less than a quarter of the bandwidth that the single cat6 cable will provide (gigabit or not) therefore 1 cable is more than adequate. The only problem you might have is the fact it is a single point of failure.
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moka
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Another option would be to lay two cables and use cable economisers (http://www.tvcables.co.uk/cgi-bin/tvcables/network-economiser.html). You need two of them for each cable and they effectively split that cable into two. Read up on them for more information. This wont actually be gigabit though, it will be 100mbps but is probably the cheapest solution.
[Edited on 11-06-2011 by moka]
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moka
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^^ Obviously you would need a female-connector version - that example is for a face plate.
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Gary
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If your running 1 cable you might as well run 4. Same amount of work.
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Chris
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Run 4 cables, but you can run CAT5e which is also 1Gb would be cheaper cable.
The main thing is the end termination if you get it wrong on the cat6 although the cable is cat6 the run wont be due to termination issues.
I would be possible to get a 1gb pass on cat5 over that length if you really wanted to cut costs.
The other problem is the backplane in a small switch wont be dedicated 1gb per port, as the server will be conected to 1 port at 1gb so each computer will only every get 250mb if they all shift data at the same time.
Same would bed the case with 1 uplink would uplink/clients=possible_client_bandwidth
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Whittie
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Registered: 11th Aug 06
Location: North Wales Drives: BMW, Corsa & Fiat
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Ordered all the shit the other night, only just come back on here to see the thread...
Bought 2 x faceplates
1 Gigabit Wireless N+ Belkin Router
305m of Cat6 cable
4 small cat6 cables to go into router from faceplate, to save me pissing about putting rj45 ends on them.
Sorted, hopefully do it next weekend.
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Sam
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I hope you bought the connectors as well?
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Gary
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Registered: 22nd Nov 06
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quote: Originally posted by Sam
I hope you bought the connectors as well?
And backboxes.
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Whittie
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quote: Originally posted by Sam
I hope you bought the connectors as well?
quote: Originally posted by Gary
quote: Originally posted by Sam
I hope you bought the connectors as well?
And backboxes.
Got a load of doubles left from changing all the plugs in the house, so a double should do it, doesnt need to be anything specific surely...?
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Gary
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No they just fasten up to standard single and double backboxes.
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Whittie
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Sorteddd. I need to speak to you, will ring you about 5ish mate.
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