running network cable in a large house....

[pjwinstalls]

I am in the midst of building a 7000sqft house 2 story. All of my 1st floor cat6 cables go to the basement where they will be connected to a switch. Should i run my 2nd floor cat6 cables all the way down to the basement or should i run them to my 2nd floor a/v closet and install a switch there? Which way would work better?

Thanks

Philip

 

[gatchel]

My personal preference is to have one point for all wiring to terminate. Keep in mind the ethernet limitation of 328 feet (100M) or so. As far as which would work better I guess it depends on how much you stress the network and with what. Are you running 10/100 or Gigabit to all devices?

 

[pjwinstalls]

Everything that can run gigabit, will be running gigabit. If i run everything to a switch on the 2nd floor, how much would that cut down by speed when accessing the internet or connecting to another computer on the 1st floor since they would be connected to a different switch?

My personal preference is to have one point for all wiring to terminate. Keep in mind the ethernet limitation of 328 feet (100M) or so. As far as which would work better I guess it depends on how much you stress the network and with what. Are you running 10/100 or Gigabit to all devices?

 

[Sacedog]

Everything that can run gigabit, will be running gigabit. If i run everything to a switch on the 2nd floor, how much would that cut down by speed when accessing the internet or connecting to another computer on the 1st floor since they would be connected to a different switch?

Typical Internet access speeds over DSL is 1.5mbs to 6mbs, and cable speeds are around 3mbs to 10mbs. If you are lucky enough to have fiber, and pay for the bandwidth, there are some consumer broadband connections over fiber now that are pushing 50mbs, however, these are VERY expensive. You more than likely will have a connnection at around 6mbs. A Gigabit network is running at 1,000mbs, or 1,000 MegaBits per Second (NOT megabytes) (8 bits per byte).

So if all you are concerned with is Internet speed, you will not have any issue with a switch upstairs. If you are running heavier network traffic, such as HiDef video via IP, then you may have an issue with having a seperate switch.

Typically the internal backbone inside of a Gigabit switch will transmit data much faster than Gigabit. This allows for multiple streams of Gigabit traffic occuring on different ports on the switch, at the same time. With 2 seperate switches, you will need to connect them to one another. Typically, you would do this using a single Cat6 gigabit cable between the two (Higher end switches will allow for port trunking to combine multiple trunks, or for 10Gig ports). This will limit the TOTAL bandwidth between the two switches to 1 gigabit. If you have multiple devices on the upstaris switch accessing multiple devices on the downstairs network, they would be sharing the same gigabit connection between the switches.

Long story short, for most home use, it is VERY VERY VERY unlikely that you would have a problem wiring using two seperate switches.

 

[pjwinstalls]

I have verizon fiber at 50mbs.

I think I will run the one switch

Thanks

Everything that can run gigabit, will be running gigabit. If i run everything to a switch on the 2nd floor, how much would that cut down by speed when accessing the internet or connecting to another computer on the 1st floor since they would be connected to a different switch?

Typical Internet access speeds over DSL is 1.5mbs to 6mbs, and cable speeds are around 3mbs to 10mbs. If you are lucky enough to have fiber, and pay for the bandwidth, there are some consumer broadband connections over fiber now that are pushing 50mbs, however, these are VERY expensive. You more than likely will have a connnection at around 6mbs. A Gigabit network is running at 1,000mbs, or 1,000 MegaBits per Second (NOT megabytes) (8 bits per byte).

So if all you are concerned with is Internet speed, you will not have any issue with a switch upstairs. If you are running heavier network traffic, such as HiDef video via IP, then you may have an issue with having a seperate switch.

Typically the internal backbone inside of a Gigabit switch will transmit data much faster than Gigabit. This allows for multiple streams of Gigabit traffic occuring on different ports on the switch, at the same time. With 2 seperate switches, you will need to connect them to one another. Typically, you would do this using a single Cat6 gigabit cable between the two (Higher end switches will allow for port trunking to combine multiple trunks, or for 10Gig ports). This will limit the TOTAL bandwidth between the two switches to 1 gigabit. If you have multiple devices on the upstaris switch accessing multiple devices on the downstairs network, they would be sharing the same gigabit connection between the switches.

Long story short, for most home use, it is VERY VERY VERY unlikely that you would have a problem wiring using two seperate switches.

 

[MikeB]

I would run them to 1 central location if you're within the 300 foot limit.

Besides the bandwith advantages as mentioned above, what if at some point you use the Cat 6 runs for something other than ethernet? Such as distributed video?

 

[huggy59]

Given the vast difference in Internet access speeds vs. internal network bandwidths, your Internet bandwidth really has nothing to do with deciding whether to run one vs. two or more switches. The inter-switch connection and bandwidth, and expected usage and location of resources is the real issue. Say you have 12 PCs upstairs, all watching a DVD-quality video over your gigabit network, which are sucking down data from the video server in the basement on the other switch. Depending on the link between the switches, you could run into saturation on the single gigabit link between switches and therefore have serious problems viewing the video. I would stick with one wiring closet and switch were possible, but concurrent connections may dictate otherwise. Then you need to properly map high-bandwidth resources onto your limited physical layer with some common sense for usage applied.

 

[pjwinstalls]

Thanks for the info!!

Given the vast difference in Internet access speeds vs. internal network bandwidths, your Internet bandwidth really has nothing to do with deciding whether to run one vs. two or more switches. The inter-switch connection and bandwidth, and expected usage and location of resources is the real issue. Say you have 12 PCs upstairs, all watching a DVD-quality video over your gigabit network, which are sucking down data from the video server in the basement on the other switch. Depending on the link between the switches, you could run into saturation on the single gigabit link between switches and therefore have serious problems viewing the video. I would stick with one wiring closet and switch were possible, but concurrent connections may dictate otherwise. Then you need to properly map high-bandwidth resources onto your limited physical layer with some common sense for usage applied.

 

[huggy59]

PS. If you think you will be using a lot of high-bandwidth applications, you will need to determine what the switch's backplane bandwidth needs to be, too. Internally, the switch has a limit as to how much data and how fast the data can move between some number of ports. Cheaper switches will have lower throughput as the trade-off in pricing or number of ports.

 

[wuench]

You or your customer will not notice any difference with one switch or two, no matter what your internet access bandwidth is. Don't even worry about it as a consideration. You can get into all the backplane discussions and bottleneck discussions above, but the simple truth is they will never use enough of that bandwidth in a house to pose an issue anytime in the foreseeable future.

I am a network engineer for a large company and we don't come close to using 1GB. Most of our uplinks are 1GB between switches, we probably use 1-5% of that typically (with the exception of large database backups) and that is supporting 6-7000+ sites and 50,000 + users.

You should instead consider what is more convenient from a cabling and future proofing standpoint and try not to exceed the cabling spec of 300+- feet above if possible (but in reality it is ok to exceed this as well to a point with proper testing and termination).

All that being said, my personal preference to bring all the cabling to a single location for convenience. Also, you might want to consider that this CAT6 may be used for other things than ethernet, like passing HDMI signals in the future when making your decision.

 

[Frunple]

I totally agree with wuench, hit it right on the money. There will be no problem with 2 or more switches in a house. You'll never see any latency at all from them.

Huggy59, a switch is designed to have the needed bandwidth based on the number of ports it has. IE, a ten port 100 meg switch will have a backbone of 2 Gig giving it 10 full duplex 100 M ports. Hubs are more what you are describing as they have a certain backbone bandwidth which is then shared to the number of ports it has.
A true switch manages bandwidth, a hub shares it.

 

[huggy59]

Well, I'll agree it is extremely unlikely that switch backplane saturation would occur. But a Netgear 24-port rackmount unmanaged switch, model number GS524T, which is a very likely candidate to be used in a home situation like this, has a backplane bandwidth of 20Gbps. It has 24 10/100/1000 ports each with up to 2000 Mbps full-duplex capability. Using 10 of those ports forwarding to 10 other ports to their limit, which is extremely unlikely but entirely possible in some situations, will saturate the backplane of the switch. In practice, this is probably never going to happen in a home or small even a business environment, but it is possible, and the switch isn't built to allow all ports running at full duplex bandwidth. You are much more likely to swamp a server's capability to supply the data than the switch, but with multiple servers...

However, using a second switch, with a limit of 2000 Mbps full duplex on a single port connected to another switch, gives you a bottle neck between switches of 1000 Mbps in each direction. This bottleneck between switches could become an issue with the right situation, even in a home environment. That's what I was getting at. And it can result in measurable and even noticable latency under the right conditions.

Now, we can go on and reference other threads about whether Windows machines can even supply enough data quickly enough to saturate a gigabit NIC, which may be more likely a problem in the case of a video server being used by mutliple clients in a home environment...

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

 

[sharby]

Well, I'll agree it is extremely unlikely that switch backplane saturation would occur. But a Netgear 24-port rackmount unmanaged switch, model number GS524T, which is a very likely candidate to be used in a home situation like this, has a backplane bandwidth of 20Gbps. It has 24 10/100/1000 ports each with up to 2000 Mbps full-duplex capability. Using 10 of those ports forwarding to 10 other ports to their limit, which is extremely unlikely but entirely possible in some situations, will saturate the backplane of the switch. In practice, this is probably never going to happen in a home or small even a business environment, but it is possible, and the switch isn't built to allow all ports running at full duplex bandwidth. You are much more likely to swamp a server's capability to supply the data than the switch, but with multiple servers...

However, using a second switch, with a limit of 2000 Mbps full duplex on a single port connected to another switch, gives you a bottle neck between switches of 1000 Mbps in each direction. This bottleneck between switches could become an issue with the right situation, even in a home environment. That's what I was getting at. And it can result in measurable and even noticable latency under the right conditions.

Now, we can go on and reference other threads about whether Windows machines can even supply enough data quickly enough to saturate a gigabit NIC, which may be more likely a problem in the case of a video server being used by mutliple clients in a home environment...

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

Worst Case Scenerio: Run a 4-6 strand Multi-Mode fiber cable between the 2 floors. This would allow you to have Gig-E fiber between 2 switches if you decide to go that route.

If your walls are open, try and install a conduit/pathway between the attic and the basement so that future cable pulls for any technology is possible. My house contains 1 demarc in the basement on a 19" rack. Good luck.


-=*Sharby*=-

 

[CollinR]

640K ought to be enough for anybody.

I doubt you have 640k video memory, if you are running Vista...

34 HD CCTV cams will do it right now.

I would do two switches and find someone to make a fiber cable to run next to it. Then you are basically as good as anyone could ever expect. In the future you can upgrade the switches. The cost of the cable should't be bad as they can make it in their shop and you (carefully) prewire it and pray for it. I guess it depends on how big a PITA it would be to change it in the future...

 

[ctay]

I would just run a string between two tin cans. Stick a can by each switch and your good to go. Just use good quality cotton string between the cans. This isn't a situation where you could cheap out and use kite string...


:lol: I need more sleep...