Routers, switches etc

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I'm looking at trying to improve the throughput of my network. At the moment, I have a BT Homehub attached via ethernet to a homeplug. I then have a desktop PC with Vista 64, a mediaserver running ClarkConnect, an Xbox 360 and a network printer all via Homeplug and a laptop on wireless.

Would I see any benefit having the Homeplug going into a switch rather than the router i.e. Homehub----ethernet cable-----switch------homeplugs to everything else. Or would I not notice the difference?

Reason I'm trying to improve things is that I am seeing transfer speeds of approx 1-2Mb/s when transferring files whether to or from the server or between PCs and whilst I know there seem to be serious issues with Vista's networking capabilities, with the cost of switches not being a fortune (for basic ones), I was wondering if this relatively cheap and simple step may improve things.

The whole router/switch/hub thing is a bit further than my noob networking skills so far, but happy to learn.

Cheers!
 
You won't notice much of a difference if you keep the homeplugs to be honest, the best speed improvement you could do would be to make everything wired (although that can be tricky to negotiate with the rest of the household!)
 
do you mean megabytes or megabits per second if you mean megabytes then what you're getting is probably about right really, even on 100meg wired networks you can only expect around 7-8megabytes/second max.
 
I mean megabytes (should read MB right?). Thought I would get a bit more than 1.5MB/s. I appreciate that 100 Base T only transmits at 100Mb/s or 12.5MB/s as a theoretical maximum, but I still feel I'm being slightly robbed of speed a little.

My server mobo and desktop have gigabit NIC and my laptop has fast ethernet, so I would assume that that would slow things down if anything involved the laptop (irrespective of wireless issues). My router is the BT Homehub one, which I would be surprised if it is a gigabit capble one, so would that slow things down anyway?

And to start to the original post, would having a gigabit switch between the router and the network speed things up then?
 
You'd still expect more than 1.5/sec to be honest.

That said, I personally really don't like the homeplug system. Go for a traditional switched network - these days even gigabit networking is very cheap indeed.
 
I was aware that the whole thing would be limited by the Homeplug, but I did expect a bit more than 1-1.5MB/s.

I'm using Homeplug as I'm in a rented house and am not sure they'd appreciate me ripping things up to install cat5 everywhere (!), although I may think about it.

If there'd be no benefit then I won't bother getting a switch - if I upgraded my Homeplugs to 200Meg ones, would there be any point then? And checked the Homehub stats last night, the router is only 100Base T, which probably wouldn't help even with the current setup?
 
It probably would. If you get less than 8 megs per second on 100Mbit ethernet then something is seriously wrong somewhere. Moving to that that is probably the best bet.
 
Aekeron said:
It probably would. If you get less than 8 megs per second on 100Mbit ethernet then something is seriously wrong somewhere. Moving to that that is probably the best bet.
Click to expand...

When you say 8 megs you mean megabytes/sec? I'm certainly getting nowhere near 8MB/s but am getting around 8 megabits/s (but it's definitely recording as megabytes/sec).

Bloody confusing!

And is it possible to get a switch with a wifi access point built in? To keep the functionality of the BT internet phone thingy on the hub but have faster wifi via the switch. Or would that involve buying a complete cable/adsl router and turning off the modem bit?
 
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