gigbit router for home?

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David Carmichael

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Dec 21, 2011, 2:15:09 AM12/21/11
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Hey all you network masterminds... 

Would I notice an difference in a home setting using a COX cable modem if I changed all my in home routers/hubs to 1000/100/10 routers? 

OR 

Are my current 10/100 routers faster enough for anything that I would get via cable internet service currently.

The reason for my question is... I finally updated my six year old "G" gateway to a new: Cisco DPC3825 DOCSIS 3.0 / "N" Gateway  : which has Four 1000/100/10BASE-T Ethernet connections.

I have noticed a marked improvement for the wireless devices... even tho I had a "N" router set up in part of the house anyway.... Now I just need to update one other device to "N"

:David



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Jason Klein

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Dec 21, 2011, 8:57:21 AM12/21/11
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David,

You need to consider which Cox internet speed are you subscribing to.  They are currently offering 1mb/s, 3mb/s, 18mb/s, 35mb/s, and 55mb/s packages but you could be grandfathered into an old package with a different speed (ie: 8mb/s, 12mb/s, etc).  If you don't know what speed you have, go to a website like Speed Test (http://www.speedtest.net/) and find out.  Assuming you're not using your Internet connection to watch movies or download large files during the speed test, the results are usually fairly accurate.

You also need to consider the model of cable modem you were using before the upgrade.  There's a chance that your previous cable modem was old enough that it still had a 10BASE-T Ethernet connection (approx 8mb/s throughput).  Simply replacing the modem may have eliminated a bottleneck if your Cox subscription includes more than 10mb/s of throughput.  In most cases, this would be a noticeable improvement.

We subscribe to 18mb/s service.  I upgraded from an older cable modem with 10/100mb/s Ethernet to a Motorola DOCSIS 3.0 cable modem with 10/100/1000mb/s Ethernet earlier this year and also felt an improvement in speed even though the old cable modem shouldn't have been a bottleneck in my case.  It could also be that these newer modems just perform better overall?

Until you are able to subscribe to 100mb/s or faster service from Cox, I doubt you would notice an improvement in Internet speeds by upgrading your home switches/hubs from 100mb/s to 1000mb/s (gigabit).  However, if you copy a lot of media (videos, cd images, dvd images, etc) between computers in your home, you could notice an improvement in local transfer speeds between those computers by upgrading from 100mb/s to 1000mb/s.  Most computers are able to transfer data across the local network at speeds greater than 100mb/s, but few computers can take advantage of the full 1000mb/s (gigabit) speed because their hard drives become the bottleneck.  Most hard disks are only rated for 30-40M/s (or 240-320mb/s) of throughput.

In short, the gigabit devices are becoming reasonable enough that it's probably worth upgrading, but you probably won't notice a performance difference unless you're moving a lot of data between your local computers.

Jason

patric conant

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Dec 23, 2011, 3:19:03 PM12/23/11
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Gigabit nics tend to have MUCH larger buffers (cache) so that may well be the source of your improvement, plugging in a nic with more cache into your cable modem. You're not likely to see improvements switching more of your PCs to giga-bit, even if you don't change your other networking equipment, counter-intuitive, but holds out in benchmarking.

David Carmichael

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Dec 23, 2011, 7:05:48 PM12/23/11
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Thanks for your well thought out reply!
I currently subscribe to the Cox 35mb/s  package.
I get my TV service from DirecTV and it is there "Show Sharing" which will be my internal bandwidth hog... I just found out the receivers that I have are only rated at 100mbs.
So other than larger buffers it really would not make much difference to me to update my routers to something faster.
But when you take into account the number of devices that might be connected at the same time.. I may just go ahead and upgrade just so that all internal routers are at the same speed.

:David


On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 7:57 AM, Jason Klein <jkl...@datility.net> wrote:

Olwe Bottorff

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Dec 24, 2011, 9:27:12 PM12/24/11
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Hey. Back in Hesston to visit. Trying to get my Thinkpad T400 (Ubuntu 11.04 Gnome classic) to run on my in-laws Cox Internet via ethernet. See my woes here: 

Wireless works just fine. Any further ideas?

Larry Bottorff
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