I have a fairly old router that doesn’t support gigabit. I also have a network switch that does support gigabit. If I connect two devices directly to the switch, then connect the switch up to the router, will the connection between the two devices support gigabit? If I’m understanding correctly the router would just act as DHCP server and give the two devices a local IP address, but the actual connection between them wouldn’t go through the router at all.
yes, that is generally how it works. There are some edge cases and possible misconfigurations that would slow things down, but in general data between the devices on the switch will be gigabit and to/from the router (and thus the internet) will be limited to 100mbit.
to/from the router (and thus the internet) will be limited to 100mbit
Assuming of course that the uplink to the internet is 100M. And that the router with firewalls, tunnels, NAT and all can actually push whole 100M trough. That’s a pretty safe assumption with 100M, but I’ve seen devices which technically hve a gigabit ethernet connection but with real world traffic the routers CPU is a bottleneck and it’ll limit speeds well below that.
NOTHING that a typical home user would buy supports the full 1Gbps. At least, not from my research. This is what’s stopping me from 1Gbps internet. My ISP offers up to 8Gbps but my real world FW throughput is about 700Mbps. I’m not dropping thousands on enterprise hardware either. All that’s left for me is DIY If I want true 10GbE
RB4011iGS+ I have can do (according to routerboard) up to 7Gbps for less than 200€. I’ve been pretty happy with it with my 1G fiber connection and it doesn’t break a sweat while doing that. Granted, I don’t run very complex stuff on the thing, but for me it can saturate the bandwidth I have available. From the ISP side I could go to 10G, but I don’t have any hardware which could manage it, so I’m not interested (at least for now).
I initially had Edge Router X from Ubiquiti, but it stalled at around 700Mbps, so that thing is now glorified POE switch on my network and majority of the traffic goes trough mikrotik router and it’s been rock solid since installation.
I’ve read a lot of mixed reviews for Mikrotik. Does yours run hot at all?
The problem with all this, I’m not hosting much from my house so why upgrade? I have symmetrical 500Mbps and sure, 10G would be cool but for what? So my Linux ISO or Game download is super fast? Then I’ll need to get an NVME cache disk, or upgrade my storage raid to SSDs… Where does it end?
My little ~$250 CAD Netgate 1100 handles the 500 Mbps. That’s really all I need. I only ever hit the limit on Usenet anyway.
I’ve read a lot of mixed reviews for Mikrotik. Does yours run hot at all?
It’s a bit different to work with than “usual” brands, but they have all the features you could ever hope for and then some and with my experience over the years they’ve been very reliable and stable. They have a bit odd models around which have only few 1G ports and the rest are 100M and things like that, but I’ve been really happy with the 4011 I have.
The model I have now runs at about 40C and it’s been on the edge of my network for 4-5 years now without any issues.
Ah great to hear! Do you have an example of what would be an issue? I assume the problem is mostly with regards to the route between two devices having to go through the router.
Yep, that should work fine. I have a mix of Gbit and 100mbit devices and a Gbit switch, each device negotiates the best link they support.
Unless you have qos or clans set up on the router, I can’t see any situation where it wouldn’t just be managed by the switch.
Yes, you’ll get a gigabit connection between any devices on the switch. The router then just handles, well, the routing ;)
