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mrk

mrk

mrk

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Am I right in thinking that a switch would take off the load of a router or would the load bearing still be the same?

Just looking at ways to further improve network throughput/performance with multiple clients connected :p

Ta!
 
Are you trying to improve your LAN performance?

If so, if your PCs are relatively new (last 3 years or so), you've probably got 1Gbit ethernet adapters as LoM ports in your PCs. If you buy a 1Gbit switch, connect all your PCs to it, then connect it to the LAN ethernet port on your router, you'll be able to transfer data between the PCs on the LAN at upto 1Gbit instead of up to 100Mbit. (You won't actually get 1Gbit though as your hard drives will become the bottleneck rather than the network.). This will have no effect on the speed at which your machines can access the internet via your router.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=NW-100-NG&groupid=46&catid=1453&subcat=1473
 
Ah yes that's what I was hinting at, as in, right now my router has 5x gigabit ports (1 which is the WAN) but I have no evidence that shows that when transferring data via LAN that my internet connection to each client isn't affected either (eg: sometimes in the past when someone is pulling a video from my lan share and I am gaming I can experienced higher latency) - would this be what it is perhaps?

I assume from your description though that by installing a switch to a LAN port on the router that all lan machines can communicate as fast as possible with no affect on how fast they access the 20MB cable line?

If so then awesome!

My lan has a mix of wireless N and G as well as Ethernet + Gigabit clients so a real bag of treats :p
 
Last edited:
mrk said:
Ah yes that's what I was hinting at, as in, right now my router has 5x gigabit ports (1 which is the WAN) but I have no evidence that shows that when transferring data via LAN that my internet connection to each client isn't affected either (eg: sometimes in the past when someone is pulling a video from my lan share and I am gaming I can experienced higher latency) - would this be what it is perhaps?

I assume from your description though that by installing a switch to a LAN port on the router that all lan machines can communicate as fast as possible with no affect on how fast they access the 20MB cable line?

If so then awesome!

My lan has a mix of wireless N and G as well as Ethernet + Gigabit clients so a real bag of treats :p
Click to expand...

If your wireless access point for your WLAN is the router, you may find that wireless access impacts the performance of your router. The reason for this is that your router's architecture probably has wireless lan and wired lan bridged togeather, and then bridged to the real LAN interface of the router.

As packets of data from the WLAN are sent and recieved at a slower rate than the wired network, they take longer to send or recieve. If the bridge services each port on a per packet basis, then it will spend more time servicing the WLAN/packet than the wired lan/packet. This could increase latency between the wired ethernet ports, but would be aleviated by moving the wired ethernet ports to a dedicated switch.
 
Ah I see, thanks.

So in theory I have 2 options.

Since I have more wireless clients than wired (3 wired) I could get either:

a: A wireless-n access point plugged into the router's free LAN port
b: A Gigabit switch

Both would give similar benefit by the sounds of it but since I dont' intend to add any more wired machines to the lan any time soon but instead add more N connected devices a dedicated N access point may well be the ideal option.

Now to research into N access points that are decent :p
 
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