10/100 vs. Gigabit

Squeezing more performance out of your network infrastructure.

Most hubs or switches installed in business today are 10/100, also known as Fast Ethernet. This operates at 10, or 100 megabits per seconds (Mbits/s). The newest standard of networking over copper is gigabit, which operates at up to 1000 megabits per second. This can more or less eliminate any bottleneck that is occurring on your network, which in turn leads to better performance of your systems and software.

A typical 10/100 Mbit/s hub:

Will I need to upgrade all my cabling? More than likely, you will not need to upgrade any cabling. As long as your cabling meets CAT5e standards (which most cabling installs in the last 5 years or more should do), then gigabit networking will operate very well. The newer CAT6 standard is preferred, but it is not essential, and would not be a cost effective upgrade.

Switches vs. Hubs

Switches and hubs do much the same thing, in that they connect all your networks points together, so that all of your computers can talk to each other. However, how they do this, and their relative efficiency at doing this, is very different. A basic hub will simply broadcast all the traffic to all the ports, whereas a more sophisticated switch, will direct traffic to the intended port. On a busy network, this can hugely increase network performance and the flow of data.

A typical gigabit smart switch :

What about the client machines?

Depending on the specification of your existing hardware, you may or may not have to upgrade the machines with gigabit network cards to enable them to transfer data at gigabit speeds.