Do 1Gb switches matter?

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Kingmer

Member
Nov 19, 2017
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So I am upgrading/improving my home network.

Generally the home is wired with cat6 to each room, plus some extras so i have 18 lines coming into my mechanical room.

I just upgraded my switch to the microtik cloud (from a dumb switch all 1Gb) - my server is on one of the 10Gb SFP+ ports and has the associated 10Gb card.

That upgrade seems to have significantly improved the multi access latency issues.

Question: many of my room clusters are using cheapo 1Gb switches...will upgrading to higher end managed switches from day microtik make any improvements?
 

i386

Well-Known Member
Mar 18, 2016
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higher definition video
Just some math:
1gbit :
  • 10x 100mbit/s 4k movies (eg Fury)
  • 20x 50mbit/s 4k movies ("average" uhd blu rays)
  • 40x 25mbit 1080p (remuxed blu rays)
  • 50+ reencoded 1080p blu rays or netflix streams
 

blood

Member
Apr 20, 2017
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It's not so much whether they're managed or not, but rather what their forwarding rate is. It used to be that only really high end switches would offer line rate at full duplex on all ports simultaneously. Sometimes switches would have "uplink ports" that weren't actually capable of linking up at higher rates than the bulk of the ports, but they had higher effective bandwidth due to not being oversubscribed. These days, getting a switch that is truly capable of line rate isn't that rare.

It may be that your cheapo switches will pass 1gbps just fine as long as you're not trying to do it full duplex on every port at the same time. You probably won't be able to find a specification that you can trust for them though. The easiest way to tell is to take the little switch out of the picture for a test - plug one of your devices directly into the uplink back to your core switch and see what it'll do - then compare to what the little switch adds.

I wouldn't worry about it though. If you already have the cheap switches, I wouldn't replace them.