wifi is used only for wife's two laptop ( one work , one home ) and a few tablets ( 3x amazon tablets for home automation, three ipads and 2 iphones plus 5 or 6 amazon dots)
current system works but wifi is spotty ( i can see at least 20 other networks form neighbours all fighting for channels ) and nas / internet can bog down when moving lots of data
Have you considered shifting devices that are capable to 5G WiFi for better speeds ?
wifi speed is NOT the issue. (coverage is)
i am after wired speed.
right now if i send data from pc1 to nas1 while sending data from pc2 to nas2 , while sending data from the mac to the timecapsule , everything runs over a single 1gb link. and it slows down. plus some pipes carry always -on streams like the ip camera's which also eat bandwidth
Due to the way the house is wired and the endpoints of the cables i have to share some pipes. That is what i am trying to solve as problem 1. : upgrade the pipes to 10G
i can pump up the pipe from the network closet to my office to 10G so if all three computers are pumping data over their gigabit link , the shared pipe is not overloaded. i can't upgrade the computers to 10gb as they are laptops / all in ones (mac).
one thing i am not clear on is how packets really travel on a network and i can't really find a good explanation on the internet
assume this
- network without subnets. Everything lives on 192.168.1.xxx
- tree structure
- router at top.
router
+--- device 1
+--- device 2
+--- switch
+--- device 3
+--- device 4
when 3 talks to 1 that is loading the switching fabric of the router
when , at the same time, 4 starts talking to 2 , the cable between switch and router is a bottleneck
so this should remove bottlenecks ( assuming we have infinite backbone on the switch itself)
router
|
+--- switch
+--- device 1
+--- device 2
+--- device 3
+--- device 4
My question is : is the above true or not ?
i want to eliminate as much intermediate switches as possible. right now i have three level deep switching. (switches behind switches behind switches)
i want to convert that to 1 level. those links will be 10G.
i don't want to start mucking with managed switching ( later 3 / 4 ) or vpn. i tried that and it becomes a horrible mess figuring out what to put where so the devices can see what they need to see.
if i go to a scenario where there is only one device per switch port then switching happens purely by mac address. 1 port = 1 device. and my big switch can easily cope with that.
where i do need a 'geographical' break ( due to home wiring) i will use a fat pipe that cannot overload
home office : 3 computers + 3 printers on a 10G link to main switch
storage cabinet : router + 3 nas devices on a 10G link to main switch
in future : 10G link to garage and 10G link to media center. and i'm not sure i will do that as the required bandwidth there is low.
media center has a roku and an apple tv which are never used simultaneously so non issue. a single 1G link is sufficient
Garage : only used for some test equipment ( which is all 100Mbit and talks locally ) and 2 pc's . perfectly workable over a single 1G link.
the link from my office to the NAS / internet is much more important as i can currently overload that link.
the router / nas is in 1 location.
the main switch is a different location