I am about to equip our old house with Cat6 S-STP cables and outlets on the walls in every room. As Im not interested in plastering the whole house with outlets, I want to put a small switch in every room and make local Networks there directly to the connected devices. The question I have is, will I Loose some of my Gigabit bandwith by doing that or would it be better to run seperate cables from the router (that would then require a router with quite many outputs). Also, Im goint to use a switch with PoE directly after one of the routers outlets to power three Wireless AP there will be spread over the house. Those AP only run 450MBit, issue?
No, you won't lose any bandwidth. Well, if we're getting technical, then you may lose some, but only in very specific circumstances. A switch, unlike a hub, only sends traffic to the port that it needs to go down. So, there's theoretically no loss in data transfer rates in having Port A talking to Port B while Port C talks to Port D; everyone gets gigabit speeds. In reality, switches have an internal backbone which may be limited: a cheap 24-port gigabit switch may, for example, only be able to do up to 10Gb/s internally - which means if you have more than ten ports actively sending/receiving at the same time, they'll be slowed down (but how frequently do you plan to transfer data between up to ten hosts simultaneously at gigabit speeds, is the real question). However, this is true of routers as well - and because routers typically have far-lower-than-gigabit WAN ports, manufacturers frequently skimp on the switch side of things. So, realistically, there's not going to be any difference in using switches with the following exception: a switch's backbone is typically faster than a single port, which is how you can have multiple ports running simultaneously with no slowdown. Daisy-chaining multiple switches together will limit data transfer rates between the two switches to the speed of a single connection. Basically, let's say you have Computers A, B, C and D on Switch 1 and Computers E, F, G, and H on Switch 2 with a single gigabit connection between the two switches. Computers A, B, C and D can all communicate with each other simultaneously without slowdown at full gigabit speed; likewise E, F, G and H. If you have a scenario where A and E, B and F, C and G, D and H are talking to each other, though, all that traffic is being squeezed down the single gigabit link between the two switches. The result: they're all sharing that one gigabit link, and each getting only a quarter of the full speed. Again, though, how often will that happen? No. Again, back in the day hubs would run at the speed of the slowest device; switches can negotiate per-port. 450Mb/s access points should have gigabit Ethernet connections anyway, but if they didn't and had 100Mb/s ports instead it wouldn't slow down the switch or wired systems in any way. Oh, and one last piece of advice: don't bother with Cat6 or shielded cable; it's a pain in the backside to work with and you'll see no benefit. Unless you're doing massively long runs, I'd just use Cat5e. Plenty good enough for gigabit, that.
I know it would be good enough via speed, what im thinking about is all the wireless signals in the house, wifi, cellphones and security system. I dont want to rewire after a few years just becuse we get more signals in the neighbourhood. Also, most of the wires are going to run very close to dvb antenna signals and I dont want them to affect eachother. So my guess is that the shielding will matter in the long run or am I wrong?
By the way, a very good answer in your post. Would it be an idea to maximize bandwidth to use small switches at my backbone closet were the router will be? Im thinking about that internal limit of 10Gbit you described. So if I have 24 outlets in the house (because of 2 outlets pr room and seperate outlets for the APs plus a few not in use) total I could devide them into 3x8 port switches and thereby limit cost and max speed.
It won't make much difference, At work we have rooms full of RF equipment used for testing mobile phone modems. And we are talking massive amounts of RF. It's all CAT5E.
Do you have a diagram of how it's all going to be connected? I'd suggest avoiding as many small switches as possible. Yes it might have a 10GBe backplane but your still throwing 7Gbps down a 1Gbps port. E.G: MX60 - Router - Connected via 1gbps to Main Switch Main Switch - ZyXEL GS2200-24 (24 Ports, 56gbps backplane) 4gbps Trunking Between Switches. Secondary Switch - ZyXEL GS1910 (24 ports, 48gbps backplane) So my bottlenecks here is if more than 4 clients pull 1gbps from switch 2 to a devices over on switch 1. I have no bottlenecks for devices on the same switch. So total backbone is 4gbps. If I went and added a 8 Port switch off the Main switch and threw 7 devices on, My bottleneck now becomes the 8 Port switch moving only 1gbps. Less switches and using bigger switches is the way to go
You're wrong, and I mean that in the politest way possible. The frequencies of 10/100/1000 Ethernet and Wi-Fi/mobile/TV/radio/CB/DVB/baby monitors/whatever signals are completely different, and the entire point of twisted-pair construction (the "TP" in UTP or STP cabling) is to reject noise. Don't just take my word for it, though, listen to Votick for actual real-world proof. On the other hand, if you want to use shielded twisted-pair (which is typically only used in very specific scenarios that don't include wiring up a house) or CAT6 (or both) then feel free to. Just be aware that it's an absolute pain to work with and you're spending more than you need to. As a former network monkey, I can attest to both there. (Oh, and remember you'll also need shielded outlets and STP patch cables - and STP patch cables are *horrid*, 'cos they've got a ridiculous bend radius). No, it wouldn't. Remember that my 10Gb/s example was just that: an example, not a hard rule. The only time you'd want to use a bunch of small switches is if you wanted to minimise the amount of cabling you had to do by putting a switch in each room and then running a cable from each switch back to the central switch rather than running four/eight/howevermany cables from each room for individual connections. Putting three eight-port switches in a single place instead of a single 24-port is daft, 'cos even if the 24-port did have a 10Gb/s-limited backbone that's still ten times faster than the two one-gigabit backbones you'd have between the three switches - and the three eight-porters will draw more power and bump up your 'leccy bill to boot.
With all the above input from Gareth and Votick I won't get even more technical with it - but, if you are going to run cabling, run more cabling than you need. It's just a good rule of thumb, even if you don't terminate the cables and just leave them in the wall box if gives you good expansion. Plus you can get quite fancy faceplates these days which fit 4 keystones into a "single" box, which is pretty cool and means you can do a lot of cable runs quite unobtrusively. I would also lay CAT5E cable, mainly as it's easy to work with/terminate and I have a whole load of faith in it as I'm a "network monkey"
Totally the correct explanation, but I think you may be underplaying the issues of daisy chaining switches, specific circumstances are worth considering carefully and it may warrant a eliminating this bottleneck. Also consider that you can daisy chain some access points and multi cable others where necessary. Finally I also assume the max distances involved are quite small, maybe no more than 20 -25m, certainly no more than 100m. If you have a computer room with your file server, gaming rig and say the wireless access point, piping through to another switch on a single gigabit line, I can see the rare occasion where a bottleneck is inevitable, for me I would just eliminate this switch and run three cables to the main switch. On large file transfers a gigabit line can be maxed for several minutes, lets say you are gaming online on the rig and someone is streaming wirelessly. You may find your game is ruined by latency and a bad case of buffer face while this occurs. QoS may assist but adds overhead, I have found QoS solutions to be unreliable. This is avoided by cabling each device separately, each line will operate at the full speed and latency required. If on the other hand it is a kitchen and you just want to hook up a security camera and net audio streamer, the maximum bandwidth will never come close to a single gigabit line, you can definitely split there with another switch. Wall space issues can be resolved, face plates can cram many ethernet connections into the same space on the wall, for instance I have these triple face plates at mine. Not sure about how badly interference effects, you have options on twists and shielding to mitigate. A lot of my cables run near mains lines which I expect are the worst culprits of interference, I am on Cat 6 and I do not think it badly effects things, my cable runs are probably no more than 10m each though. Cat6 is less pliable than 5 but I had my builder lay the cables for me so not an issue, may actually make it easier to run through a straight cavity. The cable was sold in units of 100m and at the time there was little difference between cat5e and cat6. Like I said above, most efficient would be to have a large switch with a fast backbone. Daisy chaining switches again as above, so choose carefully which devices are going to share which switch if you do this. There may be some additional latency and overhead between two devices in the same room as you will be sending the signal to the patch location to switch now, but I imagine this would be negligible.
...isn't that exactly what I said in my third paragraph, where I point out the pitfalls of communicating switch-to-switch? A wireless client should never appreciably slow down a wired client, 'cos the wired client has anything between ten and a thousand times the bandwidth - and both will likely have more bandwidth than the WAN connection. So, the example you give of the topology causing problems for online gaming doesn't hold true (also, lack of bandwidth != high latency, just like high bandwidth doesn't always make for low latency as anyone who has tried gaming on a mobile broadband connection will attest.) Now, in a scenario where you have Client A, B and C in a room on a switch with a single gigabit link to the rest of the network, would Client A performing a lengthy file transfer at line speed to a server beyond the local switch impact Clients B and C? If they were doing heavy line-speed file transfers, yes; if they were streaming video (what, 30Mb/s tops for Blu-ray-quality h.264 Full HD?) or playing games (megabit or less), almost certainly not - the connections will balance out, and Client A will see the transfer slow down a bit to make room for Clients B and C. (Incidentally, if there's only one server, then you still get the former problem even with a single switch with healthy backbone: the server itself has a gigabit connection to the network, and there's your bottleneck! That's why you'll see servers with multiple connections to the same network, usually using port-teaming on a switch to turn four independent gigabit connections into a single 4Gb/s connection.) You're absolutely right, of course, that the best possible scenario is having the network hanging off a single switch with a big enough internal backbone to support full-duplex operation on all ports simultaneously, but that's not always an option - and I think you're over-egging the pudding when it comes to the potential for trouble that comes from a multi-switch network, especially in a home environment where there aren't going to be a few hundred simultaneous users. Just my opinion as a former network monkey, mind.
More or less, I do agree with you, should hardly ever be more than an occasional annoyance. I may appear to have overstated the performance benefit, not my intention, I just wanted to highlight it does exist. I do agree with you day-to-day performance will likely be hardly impinged for home use. One other benefit I did forget to mention was the satisfaction of neatly having everything boxed away in a patch room, no crappy little switches trailing wires all round the house and lighting up rooms like Picadilly Circus. I guess the truth is if you validate your life by knowing you have the best most winningest setup going like I do, then you can justify it, that was probably my most important point
I start to see the point here. And im getting a lot more clever on how to build a home network, thanks guys! Im only on my iphone here now so cant sketch a diagram of my idea right now, but i can try to explain it: I have a livingroom were the home media system is going to be. Apple TV Linux desktop (HTPC) Smart Tv Blu-Ray player w Network Internet TV box (we have tv signal via our fiber broadband and free to air channels over dvbt) Maybe a PlayStation4 Some kind of streamer for the music system (most likely Hels by Denon) ... So instead of using a switch here I am now starting to think to use a small 8port local patch panel, and then run 8 direct lines from the backbone switch. In the ceiling there will be a AP Kitchen: Apple TV Smart tv Maybe a second iptv box Music streamer ...here I will just run 1 direct line and then a small switch. Also here there will be a direct attached AP for wifi. Guest room: 1 direct line in 2 of the corners in the room, so if needed there can always extendes with a switch. Kids room: Same as the guest room (kids are only 2 1/2 years and 2 months at the moment) Master bedroom: 1 direct line on both sides of the bed, 1 in the closet, 1 in the furthest away corner in case we want a streamer or tv connected later on. 17 direct lines so far if I have counted right... A direct connected AP in the hallway. Office: Gaming rig Linux machine Mac Work computer (when im working from home) Printer Apple TV 2 extra ports. ...a direct attached 8 port patch panel. So in all I need at least 26 ports, so I might just end with buying a 48 port switch so there is absoluttely no backbone issues. Directly attached I also need two servers so my total need is 28 + router connected, 29 ports. Think I will use Cat6 UTP, just because I can see there is virtually no price difference on that and 5e. Anything I have maybe not thought about? By the way, would 3 802.11n APs be able to cover 174sq/m house? The router dont do wifi
Depends on the quality of the radio and how many it uses. One of my MR18 covers my whole house and garden in 2.4ghz & 5Ghz. - I have 2 for lulz so it covers 5 neighbours aswell xD
I am thinking about getting three of these http://www.zyxel.com/products_services/nwa1120_series.shtml?t=p Zyxel NWA-1121NI It has only one 2.4GHz radio with two antennas, antenna gain 7dBi, powered over PoE and small. Another option would be three Of the NWA-1123 models, in either N or AC version. They cost double of the 2.4GHz only models and they have weaker gains. I dont have any AC equiptment, there is no real issue with 2.4Ghz as I can barely discover my neighbours wifi and the gains seem more tempting so we also cover some of the garden with wifi.
if you want to do the multi switch scenario, you can get switches that do link aggregation (LAG) which gives you extra bandwidth - it does not give you extra speed as some would have you believe, it combines 2 or more ports at each end; this is good for redundancy and heavy network loads.
You can get a Cisco Meraki MR18 access point free for just attending a webinar. As long as you don't use a gmail or hotmail etc address. Comes with three years support included. Migt cut down your costs somewhat.
I feel like it's not quite that simple - surely there's some sort of qualification on Cisco's part by way of human intervention to prevent abuse?
Terms & Conditions: To be eligible for a free MR18 access point, participants must: Attend the live event or the live webinar in its entirety; Enter a valid company name; Be an IT professional; Register with a shipping address in the US, CA, UK or the rest of the EEA, Croatia, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, or Puerto Rico. (Meraki cannot ship free APs outside of these regions, or to PO boxes; Supply a valid VAT ID for European organisations; Register with their organisation's email address; Confirm eligibility and shipping address with a Cisco Meraki representative by phone. Please note, if you are unable to accept your AP due to restrictions, (e.g., Erate), Cisco Meraki will be happy to provide you with a trial AP, which can be returned following your evaluation of our solution. As APs are provided as an educational tool to those new to the Cisco Meraki platform, individuals and organisations who have received a free access point through other promotions are not eligible; Promotion is limited one free AP per organisation and per individual. Due to abuse, Meraki cannot provide free access points to individuals who register with yahoo, gmail, hotmail, and other similar email addresses.
It's basically a hook. If they don't sucker you in then you have a paper weight in 3 years time. Worse is if they do and you now have an additional MR18 and a Firewall from them xD
