Gigabit or 100Mb ?

For a home network that is wired with Cat5e, will distribute internet around a variety of PCs,TVs,PS3s, a NAS drive, Humax Freesat with I player etc.

Need to get some switches, do I bother with the Gigabit ones for a bit more money, futureproof them maybe....


TIA

A 100 meg network should be more than sufficient for a home network, and should be able to stream high def video in a compressed format without any loss of quality. Certainly such a network would be much better than all but the most expensive consumer broadband internet connection.

However if you have a need for a faster network, or if you envisage yourself acquiring something that may need a higher connection speed (such as streaming uncompressed high def video) and you can afford the extra cost, a gigabit network would not hurt.

Uncompressed 1080p is around 1.6Gbps - i.e. in the realms of fibre.

Invariably even what people think is uncompressed is compressed to a small extent. Even in the TV world edits are not done on the uncompressed material

In reply to a post by TheBaron:

For a home network that is wired with Cat5e, will distribute internet around a variety of PCs,TVs,PS3s, a NAS drive, Humax Freesat with I player etc.

Need to get some switches, do I bother with the Gigabit ones for a bit more money, futureproof them maybe....


TIA

For a single user 100Mb should be fine. If you have two or three people streaming or copying files then 1Gb might be better. Then again if you are all sharing a single local server you may find that's the bottleneck.

Edited by Andrue (Mon 18-Oct-10 09:40:14)

I stand corrected. I knew uncompressed high def was bad, I didn't realise it was quite that bad. But then Video Compression isn't my area of expertise.

Usually for edit it runs at around 220Mbps, which is a speed that the edit hardware can cope with.

Uncompressed HD direct from source into a 40 inch 1080p display looks stunning, even compared to blu-ray which is around 25Mbps usually.

Switches? More than one?

Depends on your budget really - a dumb 100Mb switch as in most home routers will most likely be fine for most people.

Some of those devices may only have 100Mb interfaces anyway.

If you do want to futureproof, there are plenty good quality Gb switches at the £100 mark, depending on number of ports you need.

More details, including your budget, and we can maybe point out some potentials?

I wouldn't run 100Mbps switches for free at home. File transfers over gigabit ethernet are just too nice.

As you can see you are getting mixed responses here..... That is because people do different things with their networks. I, personally, store all my files on a local file server, and sometimes do things like copy 150GB harddrive images across the network, which of course, needs gigabit unless you want to sit around and wait all day.

If you are mainly streaming, moving small files (by small.... i mean less that 500MB or so) then you dont have to worry about gigabit too much.

If you often copy files across your network, then yeah, gigabit is the way to go.

Also, unless you are planning on getting a switch with LOTS of ports.... gigabit isn't that much more expensive.

If you want, I pointed to this, among others, on the "Which cat5e cable" thread a few days ago,

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/197571

Seems good value to me, though I don't know the brand, some sort of generic Chinese thing I would imagine.

If you're going to bother with Gigabit, get a switch that has good internal throughput. A maker's willingness to quote backplane throughput figures is a good starting point.