2 gigabit switches, bottlenecked by rotuer

I have a gigabit switch in living room by my pc. tv, games consoles, sky biox etc and I have another in hallway going to 2 bedrooms.

I totally forgot my router is not gigabit so instead of buying another switch I wondered about a cheap router since its fibre I have a BT modem and seperate Plusnet router I just want a router with gigabit ports that works to connect to Plusnet service.

Something like this TP Link router at £45 will do the job. Plus adding dual-band wireless too.

If the router is causing a bottle neck then the easiest solution is to feed one switch from the other. That way only minimal local management data is sent to the router along with external uploads and download which will already be limited to the connection speed.

That seems awkward as would have to bridge the 2 ethernet cables with a simple splitter then run a 10m cable across to gigabit switch to get the internet to 1 of the switches.

I remembered a previous tenant left a recent Virgin Media router, I think that is gigabit I assume at least I can use that as a passthrough or is there a way to get it to connect to plusnet services using the bt modem as the modem?

No

In that case, as I presume both switch are going back to the router, get a cheap 4 port Gigabit switch, locate it next to the router, feed the router into one port and the two switches into other ports. You can bet a simple one for around £12.

I seem to have a slight new problem, I have enough cable to run a single cable into bedroom which is originally where I had planned to have 2nd switch running to each device but as right now all that is in bedroom 1 is a single pc I used the long Cat5e cable

I was only getting about 1.6 megabytes a second transfer, so tried a cable that I knew was cat6 and the same, I disabled wireless on both and got 10 megabytes a second which is not gigabit, I checked the cable at back of living room pc which is running to a TP Link gigabit switch and its cat5e then it has a cat6 cable running to a 2nd gigabit switch which has the cable running directly into pc 2.

CAt5e should be good enough for transfer so what is the problem?

Hmm despite being Cat5e I cant seem to use gigabit with it.

Edited by deleted (Mon 21-Jul-14 16:45:27)

First of all check that every device is set for Gigabit - it is possible to configure most network cards for 100Mbit. If you have wired your own sockets, check that they are all wired correctly on all 8 cores.

It just does not seem to like cat5e cables but I know I used them at old property just cant remember if it was for the gigabit connections as I know most cables were cat6 apart from a few old spares I owned that I used for sky box and xbox since they did not have gigabit connectors. I tried a cat 6 cable in back of pc and cat 6 cable to router and it gave gigabit speeds just not with cat6 to switch then cat5e to bedroom pc.

I am just running cable in the gaps of the carpet next to skirting boards, most of it is visible but as its on the floor its not noticable

Anyway I want to double check what was asked above, can I just use the Virgin router as a extender for ethernet and not use the modem part which will be handled by my Plusnet router since my cat6 cable is about 3 feet too short to plug into back of pc and it will take a few days for anything to arrive from Ebay

If you disable the DHCP router and turn off the wireless and ensure that the Virgin router does not clash with any IP addresses on your network you can use that, 1 port gets used to link to existing network and adds you three Ethernet ports.

Given the hassle in doing the above then a cheap Netgear switch should be less hassle at £9.88, unless waiting for delivery is the big problem.

Ideally when running Ethernet around a home you should run infrastructure wiring with sockets, and then you can quickly vary the length of cable using patch cords to the various devices.