Any opinions on setting up gigabit LAN?

Posts: 6 · New Forum Member Joined: Feb 07, 2009 Posts: 6

Hi,

I'm thinking about setting up a gigabit LAN in my house. One of the main reasons why is because I have a couple slingboxes and some tivos that persistently use the LAN network and fight for bandwidth. Here is my current setup:

Comcast Coax ->
Linksys Cable Modem ->
Linksys WRT54G2 Wireless Router ->
Port #1) 10/100Mbps switch -> Cat6 to the rest of the house
Port #2) Uniden Vonage phone
Port #3) Gigabit nic card on PC

What would be the best way to start getting Gigabit connections to the rest of the house from Port#1? Could I just replace the switch to a gigabit switch and be fine or do you guys suggest something else?

Thanks!
b

Posts: 830 · Vonage Forum Evangelist Joined: Jun 08, 2007 Posts: 830

Gigabit switch on Port 1 AND gigabit network adapters on the PC's and devices, also connect the PC with the Gigabit NIC to the switch on Port 1.

Posts: 656 · Posted: Sat Feb 07, 2009 2:10 pm Post subject:

Just remember that the Slingbox and the Tivo DO NOT have a Gigabit interface. So even with a PC using a Gigabit adapter connected to Gigabit switch will not provide you with any visible improvement in bandwidth between PC and Slingbox. The only real advantage to having a Gigabit switch would be if multiple PC's on the switch had Gigabit NIC's. You would see a vast improvement in the speed of your file transfers between these PC's.

Streaming Audio / Video, even HD does not go near 100Mb. I have tested HD streams from Blu-Ray rips on a file server to a Home Theater PC on both Gigabit and 100Mb switches. During fast motion sequences, the bandwidth would peak at about 30Mbps. So no difference in quality or performance.

And my Slingbox averages about 8Mbps on SD streams with Audio / Video settings are maxed out for HD resolutions..

Unless you are going to be running multiple concurrent Audio/ Video streams within your LAN, you wont notice a difference as a 100Mb connection in Full Duplex can actually do 200Mbps. 100 in each direction.

Posts: 6 · New Forum Member Joined: Feb 07, 2009 Posts: 6

Thanks for the insight! I'm more concerned about traffic. Let's say I'm trying to move a file from my PC to my Tivo (mpg) and at the same time, the slingbox is being used. Right now I see that the transfer is slow, but once I turn off the slingbox, the transfer speeds up. Would having a gigabit switch in this case allow for faster transfers from the PC to Tivo while still using the slingbox?

Posts: 656 · Posted: Sat Feb 07, 2009 3:52 pm Post subject:

It shouldn't since the transfer to the Tivo can only max out at 100Mbps and that is assuming it has a 10/ 100Mb and not just a 10Mb ethernet port. I don't know the specs on it.

And your Slingbox traffic should be well under 10Mbps unless you have the HD version. And even then it shouldn't use that much. While you may see a small improvement, until Tivo and Slingbox type devices also have Gigabit ethernet ports, you are still limited to slower transfer rates. You will only have an increase of bandwidth capacity between PC and Gigabit switch but then it can bottleneck since the Tivo and Slingbox only negotiate to 10 or 100Mbps at the switch. Those are your choke points.

Posts: 6 · New Forum Member Joined: Feb 07, 2009 Posts: 6

Thanks for explaining things again. I wonder what was going on during that time I was testing since I was getting some slow speeds. I'll try to run some more tests with the slingbox running while transferring files. Hopefully it was just an anomaly.