Sorry, another recommend switch thread

JJimmyJ

JJimmyJ

JJimmyJ

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Joined
21 Jan 2010
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573
Hello,

Apologies in advance, but got some cabling running round the house (at last) and I'm now at the stage of buying a switch. Thought it would be a simple task, but looking at reviews I keep seeing lots of issues with gigabit switches topping out at 100mb. I'm with virgin on 1gig, wanting to hook up my pc, server and some other devices and don't want to throttle down to 100mb. Was looking at tp-link sg108s or Netgear gs308. Any know if they are actually full 1gig?
 
A gigabit switch will do gigabit. Don't confuse gigabit with gigabytes. 1 gigabit equates 125 megabytes. Any gigabit switch will do the same.
 
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andy_mk3 said:
A gigabit switch will do gigabit. Don't confuse gigabit with gigabytes. 1 gigabit equates 125 megabits. Any gigabit switch will do the same.
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Hmmm, I might be being a bit thick here, but all gigabit switches I've seen seem to be gigabit = 1000mbps. I admit, networking is not one of my strong points. So, my assumption was a gigabit switch would give me a full gig=1000mbps? I just don't want to end up throttling at 100mbps
 
Any gigabit switch will handle a full speed gigabit connection.

If you get throttled down to 100 Mbps you've either got a cabling issue or the device you're connecting isn't gigabit capable (i.e. user error).

andy_mk3 has mistyped his reply. He meant to say that 1 gigabit equals 125 Megabytes. The difference between bits and bytes can cause confusion, especially when people don't use b (bit) and B (byte) correctly when writing.
 
bremen1874 said:
Any gigabit switch will handle a full speed gigabit connection.

If you get throttled down to 100 Mbps you've either got a cabling issue or the device you're connecting isn't gigabit capable (i.e. user error).

andy_mk3 has mistyped his reply. He meant to say that 1 gigabit equals 125 Megabytes. The difference between bits and bytes can cause confusion, especially when people don't use b (bit) and B (byte) correctly when writing.
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Cool, cheers. Bits and bytes, very confusing. I'll go with one of the switches I've seen. Hopefully my wiring is ok and the throttling reports are down to user error. Cheers all
 
Only problem with the newer TP-Link switches is that they no longer have the dual colour LEDs on the ports. You used to be able to immediately tell if a cable (or device) was connected at 100Mbps instead of 1Gbps because the LED would be orange instead of green, but the newer ones are green regardless.
 
I have never encountered any throttling with any switches I have bought but perhaps those people are referring to they way that some chips fail. I certainly have heard of the performance of switches dropping away over the years.
 
How many ports do you need?

Do you want any PoE ports? This is so you can provide data and power through one network cable to a device. IE for a wireless access point, CCTV camera, IP phone, amongst other devices.
 
SpellowHouse said:
I have never encountered any throttling with any switches I have bought but perhaps those people are referring to they way that some chips fail. I certainly have heard of the performance of switches dropping away over the years.
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I've had those kind of problems with brands like Belkin and D-Link, etc. though they still lasted a few years before issues. The Netgear GS series and TP-Link GS series I've had in use since forever no problems, pretty much forget they are there, never have to power cycle or anything, no performance issues.

For the average home setup I don't really see any reason to buy anything other than the Netgear or TP-Link GS unless you also need other features.
 
bledd said:
How many ports do you need?

Do you want any PoE ports? This is so you can provide data and power through one network cable to a device. IE for a wireless access point, CCTV camera, IP phone, amongst other devices.
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Hmmm, I've been debating this one as well. I'd probably not need Access Points, unless things changed in the future, and by that time there might be somthing else etc.
I have been thinking about cctv though, just an internal type camera at a window, so the POE would be handy at that point. I guess they're only around £20 extra, but again I read reports that these can cause issues with other ports. I maybe reading too much into this.
 
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