Considering buying 2.5 Gbps USB dongles for home PCs - would 1 Gbps router need changing?

King Mustard

King Mustard

King Mustard

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I want to improve transfer speeds between my two PCs. 100 MB/s isn't really enough.

Our ISP is BT Broadband and we use their BT Smart Hub (sometimes called the Home Hub 6), which was released in 2016.

I am considering buying 2x Plugable 2.5G USB-C and USB to Ethernet Adapter (totals £64) for the two PCs in the house, which are both currently connected via CAT5e cable to the above wireless router.

Presumably, the router will limit the speed to 1 Gbps.

What options do I have?

Is a wireless router replacement the only possibility to get this working?

I ideally don't want to spend over £100 total, as the upgrade from 1 Gbps to 2.5 Gbps would then not be worth it for me.

I also can not run any more cabling.
 
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Yes both your BT hub and network cards in the PCs will be restricting your internal wired network to 1GB. So to get this to 2.5 or above you can leave the BT hub alone and add in a more capable switch (the BT hub and two PCs will all connect with a single cable each to the new switch) however I'm not aware (so might be corrected) there are any/many home versions of this type of switch yet. A quick look shows a Netgear business one which is £300 odd.

So yes it can be done but unless I'm out of date on home networking, a 2.5-5GB switch won't be cheap, neither will be upgrading the NICs on the PCs. Most modern motherboards comes with 2.5G ethernet. I would avoid anything USB related for networking so would be looking at a PCI-E 2.5G network card in each PC.
 
Duke said:
Yes both your BT hub and network cards in the PCs will be restricting your internal wired network to 1GB. So to get this to 2.5 or above you can leave the BT hub alone and add in a more capable switch (the BT hub and two PCs will all connect with a single cable each to the new switch) however I'm not aware (so might be corrected) there are any/many home versions of this type of switch yet. A quick look shows a Netgear business one which is £300 odd.

So yes it can be done but unless I'm out of date on home networking, a 2.5-5GB switch won't be cheap, neither will be upgrading the NICs on the PCs. Most modern motherboards comes with 2.5G ethernet. I would avoid anything USB related for networking so would be looking at a PCI-E 2.5G network card in each PC.
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Thank you for your response :)
 
King Mustard said:
I want to improve transfer speeds between my two PCs. 100 MB/s isn't really enough.
Click to expand...

If it's just between two PCs for a bit more you can buy 10 Gbps NICs and run a cable directly between the two.

My basket at Overclockers UK:
Total: £178.60 (includes shipping: £8.70)​
​

Okay, it's well over £100 but they are 10 Gbps cards. And you can get a 5 port 10 Gbps switch for £200 or so, or an 8 port for £275.
 
The router wouldn't need changing, you can do two things, a direct connection as mentioned between two, this can be done in tandem with your existing setup but is a little more complicated than the alternative which is to add an unmanaged 2.5G hub/switch for ~£100 and pipe your router and PCs into that.

If you have extra ports on your router you can also utilize extra 1gb connections should you have them to

I use a 2.5G USB dongle on my laptop and it works perfectly fine.
 
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May be worth considering just going all out and getting a 10G switch if you're spending this much already.
 
Why when the 10Gb route is well documented and proven don’t you do what’s been done previously and buy a pair of Intel x540 or Supermicro 10Gb cards? 4x the speed, proven support with a decent chipset and full 10Gb, down side is you’re going to have to add £10-50 to your budget or get lucky.

Could always look at bonding depending on the OS’ and transfer protocol/usage as another route, also last I looked, 2.5Gb dongles were cheaper than that on the usual sites, especially if purchased from China.
 
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