What should go into an Ethernet Switch

SimonPeterArnold posted:

Go wirless less mess, less fuss, now worrying about cables, switches. Mine just works and it's the best thing I did. It's sounds identical to what it did before using cable and switches. Just make sure you buy decent kit.

Also agree with this... overlapping WLAN access points set as ESSID where your listening ing room is the way to go with the APs wired to a switch. If you have a single home broadband router Wi-fi access point, it is unlikely Wi-fi will be effective for you for streaming connectivity.

GARY! 

Thanks for your recent response that's really helpful . I hadn't thought of aggregating ports so will definitely look at that . 

Simon-in-Suffolk posted:

SimonPeterArnold posted:

Go wirless less mess, less fuss, now worrying about cables, switches. Mine just works and it's the best thing I did. It's sounds identical to what it did before using cable and switches. Just make sure you buy decent kit.

Also agree with this... overlapping WLAN access points set as ESSID where your listening ing room is the way to go with the APs wired to a switch. If you have a single home broadband router Wi-fi access point, it is unlikely Wi-fi will be effective for you for streaming connectivity.

Except that for the OP, with his 'Victorian house with very thick stone walls' he will still need to run Ethernet cables around the house to connect any WAPs. as they probably won't work too well without wired connections back to the router. Once you've done that, chances are you're going to stick a switch or two around the house for those devices that want or need it, such as NAS drives, and 'legacy' Naim streamers which do not have good WiFi capability.

I tried the wireless route in my wooden house in Seattle and even with Gigabit Internet and Velop Wireless Extenders it simply didn't give me the response or reliability i wanted . Im streaming to 7 rooms ( 4 with Naim & 3 with Sonos) and I am a big Roon user . Running Ethernet cable to each room fixed all the problems 

Given wireless didn't work in Wooden Seattle i cant see it having any chance with Edinburgh Victorian Stone :-) 

Terrysmi posted:

GARY! 

Thanks for your recent response that's really helpful . I hadn't thought of aggregating ports so will definitely look at that . 

Terry, how fast do you need your LAN to be? Mine runs on those switches that Gary seems to loathe as being 'grossly obsolete' by which I presume he means that they run at 100Mb, not Gigabit speeds. 100Mb is the same as your NDX has, and faster than your internet connection will be, and for me, is just fine. By all means give yourself some future proofing by using Gb switches if you feel the need, but I would imagine that adding port aggregation too would be overkill for the majority of domestic networks. OK, if you have kids at home who want online gaming while your wife watches HDTV and you want to avoid Tidal dropouts, maybe the more headroom the better, but I would question the need for more than regular Gb speeds for most of us.

Chrissu 

I hear you and the limiting factor in our new home will be the speed of the pipe coming in . There are times where we have on line gaming , my photographer wife accessing her 1.5TB DB in the cloud and me streaming tidal masters all at the same time , hence my focus on trying to get this right  

ChrisSU posted:

Simon-in-Suffolk posted:

SimonPeterArnold posted:

Go wirless less mess, less fuss, now worrying about cables, switches. Mine just works and it's the best thing I did. It's sounds identical to what it did before using cable and switches. Just make sure you buy decent kit.

Also agree with this... overlapping WLAN access points set as ESSID where your listening ing room is the way to go with the APs wired to a switch. If you have a single home broadband router Wi-fi access point, it is unlikely Wi-fi will be effective for you for streaming connectivity.

Except that for the OP, with his 'Victorian house with very thick stone walls' he will still need to run Ethernet cables around the house to connect any WAPs. as they probably won't work too well without wired connections back to the router. Once you've done that, chances are you're going to stick a switch or two around the house for those devices that want or need it, such as NAS drives, and 'legacy' Naim streamers which do not have good WiFi capability.

Well in this rather old Edwardian house wireless is fine going through the solid brick walls and bouncing round door ways, albeit 2.4 tends to be stronger than 5, but I run them balanced on my APs, so they will adjust to support conditions with the client position.... I simply run PoE lines to the WLAN access point back to a centralised group of switches... a lot easier. I use aggregated links between my switches... this helps with performance, doubt it has much or anything to do with SQ. BTW it’s a misconception to think aggregation raises link/sync speed.. it doesn’t... the physical  conditions and sync clock frequencies are the same as for non aggregated... what does happen is that flows are distributed across the links allowing an increase in concurrent throughput rather than network speed. Aggregation is a very sensible thing to do between core switches even on home networks... it reduces concurrent latency, increases concurrent throughput and provides a degree of resilience as a bonus. Using Fast Ethernet or GigE aggregation with two or three lines between switches is what I would recommend. I use two line aggregation.  For all those with 2960 switches, if you know how to configure them, they all support two methods of aggregation.

Terry,

For the benefit of the data access use (to the cloud storage) Gigabit Ethernet will be fine, as it will for the audio usage and the online gaming.  The bandwidth and latency limitations will be those of your connection to your ISP not the internal network of the house; this will continue to apply for some time in the future, even with FTTP external connections.  And you can still use Cisco Catalyst switches for the higher quality audio setups (even the cheaper obsolete 2960 switch, provided you get the G version!), so there's little point in downgrading from 1000BaseT to 100BaseT.

Having said that, given the tiny difference in cost, the recommendation to use Cat 6 (or 6a) cables to future proof your internal network infrastructure is a very sound one (particularly if you use cables from a reliable supplier such as BJC), but there's little point in buying mega expensive 10GBaseT switches, as switches can be replaced easily as and when required.

Huge, just a correction, the 2960 Series switches are not obsolete.. far from it.. the latest incarnation ate the X and L versions of the 2960 are recently  available and very much a favourite edge switch  to use in many new commercial scenarios. The earlier very much older versions of the 2960 are indeed obsolete, and is quite common with this manufacturer to upgrade versions of a series of product. These older obsolete versions  of the 2960 series are as you say available cheaply and are ideal for home use.

True, I wasn't sufficiently specific.
Rather than just saying "the cheaper obsolete 2960 switch" I should have specified "the cheaper (s/h) obsolete versions of the 2960 switch"!

The other observation is that despite the advancing years of the older versions, because of their design and build quality, they are exceptionally reliable and the vast majority of them still maintain that very high level of physical layer integrity and stability.

Simon-in-Suffolk posted:

ChrisSU posted:

Simon-in-Suffolk posted:

SimonPeterArnold posted:

Go wirless less mess, less fuss, now worrying about cables, switches. Mine just works and it's the best thing I did. It's sounds identical to what it did before using cable and switches. Just make sure you buy decent kit.

Also agree with this... overlapping WLAN access points set as ESSID where your listening ing room is the way to go with the APs wired to a switch. If you have a single home broadband router Wi-fi access point, it is unlikely Wi-fi will be effective for you for streaming connectivity.

Except that for the OP, with his 'Victorian house with very thick stone walls' he will still need to run Ethernet cables around the house to connect any WAPs. as they probably won't work too well without wired connections back to the router. Once you've done that, chances are you're going to stick a switch or two around the house for those devices that want or need it, such as NAS drives, and 'legacy' Naim streamers which do not have good WiFi capability.

Well in this rather old Edwardian house wireless is fine going through the solid brick walls and bouncing round door ways, albeit 2.4 tends to be stronger than 5, but I run them balanced on my APs, so they will adjust to support conditions with the client position.... I simply run PoE lines to the WLAN access point back to a centralised group of switches... a lot easier. I use aggregated links between my switches... this helps with performance, doubt it has much or anything to do with SQ. BTW it’s a misconception to think aggregation raises link/sync speed.. it doesn’t... the physical  conditions and sync clock frequencies are the same as for non aggregated... what does happen is that flows are distributed across the links allowing an increase in concurrent throughput rather than network speed. Aggregation is a very sensible thing to do between core switches even on home networks... it reduces concurrent latency, increases concurrent throughput and provides a degree of resilience as a bonus. Using Fast Ethernet or GigE aggregation with two or three lines between switches is what I would recommend. I use two line aggregation.  For all those with 2960 switches, if you know how to configure them, they all support two methods of aggregation.

Clearly, the Edwardians had moved on from the limited network design skills of their predecessors then! In my Victorian house, there is no way the wireless signal is getting through the thick stone internal walls. I did once get a pair of Apple WAPs to see each other by positioning them in highly impractical positions with a direct line of sight through doorways, but the only practical way to get them working was to wire them together. But if you are running PoE lines to your WAPs, does that not mean that you, too, are giving them a wired connection rather than running them on WiFi only - perhaps I have misunderstood?

Point taken re. aggregation, I hadn't realised quite how it worked. I guess from Terry's point of view, starting from scratch, it does make sense to plan for it.

garyi posted:

Peder posted:

garyi posted:

I feel like this is all getting out of hand, but luckily it seems to be restricted to the naim forum!

Use a switch for its intended use, having multiple switches because you believe it might 'sound' better is madness. removing your fridge from your house would be better still, remove all wall warts from your house, it will sound better. Move to a concrete bunker with isolated electrical feed directly from the power company, no internet, no wifi. It will sound better.

The recommended switch around here is grossly obsolete. Meaning you will be restricting bandwidth to your nuk by 10 times, if you subscribe to the madness then your only real choice is two switches connected to the main switch. On the upside with all those switches it should sound awesome!

 

???? GARYI,....This said with respect....again.!
I'm so tired of such comments.

 

As Terrysmi (OP)wrote.....Garyi
Thank  for the response . I’ve clearly unwittingly hit a nerve here and I hope you feel better after your vent :-) 

 

/Peder???? 

It's essential for everyone to have a voice on these subjects ????and it is not your position to tell me what to do.

 

So yeah, I'll say something, each time.

 

 

???? GARYI,...WRONG,WRONG,..it's everyone's responsibility...both on forums AND in real life, to react if you see someone being badly treated, insulted, sarcastically responded to or otherwise "slapped on the head".

If you do not defend someone being badly treated, then I believe that you are "weak as a human being".

GARYI,...here you see in this thread,that a number of people have responded to your way of expressing yourself in your first post.
Draw conclusions from it.!

So I conclude this case...

/Peder ????

Peder,  its a forum & this thread is not about forum behaviour.   If you don't like it,  ignore it,  move on.

Peder, nobody is "being badly treated here" .  Garyi expressed an opinion (on the idea of multiple switches), that is all. I can't see any insult here. Time to leave it be.  And no it is not your job to moderate.  That's mine.  thank you.

???? MIKE-B,... as I just wrote, "so I conclude this case ????".

But it is important to respond, react to inferior behaviour.... we all have responsibility for that.
In this I do not count in that it can be wrong, sometimes misunderstood because we are from different countries and cultures.

Richard.. I definitely do not moderate ????, only react as with man.

Case closed.!

/Peder ????

Huge posted:

Terry,

For the benefit of the data access use (to the cloud storage) Gigabit Ethernet will be fine, as it will for the audio usage and the online gaming.  The bandwidth and latency limitations will be those of your connection to your ISP not the internal network of the house; this will continue to apply for some time in the future, even with FTTP external connections.  And you can still use Cisco Catalyst switches for the higher quality audio setups (even the cheaper obsolete 2960 switch, provided you get the G version!), so there's little point in downgrading from 1000BaseT to 100BaseT.

Having said that, given the tiny difference in cost, the recommendation to use Cat 6 (or 6a) cables to future proof your internal network infrastructure is a very sound one (particularly if you use cables from a reliable supplier such as BJC), but there's little point in buying mega expensive 10GBaseT switches, as switches can be replaced easily as and when required.

Agreed on the gigabit ethernet. However if its 100Tbase switch then even though the ISP may still be slower in terms of your LAN you are seriously holding things back, for instance backup from one PC to another, or copying large sets of files, I would far rather see circa 110MB/s rather than 10MB/s in that scenario.

Baring in mind that modern access points will happily chug along at 40-50MB/s if not more, then here again you could seriously be curtailing your experience by settling for an old switch.

ChrisSU posted:

.... I did once get a pair of Apple WAPs to see each other by positioning them in highly impractical positions with a direct line of sight through doorways, but the only practical way to get them working was to wire them together. But if you are running PoE lines to your WAPs, does that not mean that you, too, are giving them a wired connection rather than running them on WiFi only - perhaps I have misunderstood?

Well I guess if you are in a room where there is for example no mobile signal effectively possible when there is ample strength outside then the chances are WLAN is not going to be effective across internal wall boundaries.

In my setup one of my APs radiates across floors, and I have wooden joists between my thick solid walled room... works very well. I guess if you have reinforced concrete floors or very small thick walled rooms this is not going to work. I find landings and hall ways often ideal locations, and for aesthetic reasons I will site next to smoke detector where I can, as the APs can look very similar.

Funny in my professional world I have more challenges with wlan signals reaching areas that they are not supposed to rather than the other way around when using commercial grade APs... and some of those buildings can be quite elderly and necessarily solidly built....

The PoE is a way of providing power and data connectivity to APs using just a single Ethernet cable. This makes it far easier to discretely  route cables without having to worry  about power supplies and mains wiring as well.

Gary, I never suggested using 100BaseT; in fact, quite the reverse I advocated 1000BaseT (i.e. Gigabit Ethernet) as that will ensure that the data communications inside the house are faster and have lower latency than the connection to the ISP.  I specifically argued against limiting the network to 100BaseT.

I also pointed out that you can get a Gigabit version of the older (now obsolete and hence cheap, but still fully functional) Cisco 2960; you just have to specify the 2960G series (or you could go for some of the more recent models).

Incidentally my WiFi is IEEE802.11ac and registers a connection speed of 450mbps with some devices, so I'm aware of potential for WiFi to exceed 100BaseT throughput.

Hi Huge, no I agreed with you. But my understanding is the cisco switch de jour is a 100TBase which could be a real bottle neck in a lan if used for anything other than an NDX!

Gigabit all the way.

The Cisco 2960G xxx series of switches (and some later ones) are Gigabit switches...  so I don't see where the problem is.

Or many of the older 2960 series switches were Fast Ethernet edge ports and had GigE uplink port(s)..therefore better balancing the load if there was a lot of data needing to transferred... it work well. It’s interesting I have quite a busy home LAN with severeal NAS and transfers of UHD (4K) video content ... and my Fast Ethernet ports really don’t break out into a sweat at all.. I see this quite a lot in my professional world many people don’t have a  real appreciation of real duplex effective throughputs and don’t appreciate how fast a 100 Mbps duplex is  in real world. Many people have calibrated their experiences of data ‘speed’ based on shared fibre or asynchronous DSL internet feeds or Wi-fi sync speeds which bear little throughput correlation to duplex wired Ethernet. I have one instance where 18000 professional users are very easily accommodated with a duplex 10gbps data centre and internet access link.

On wlan with the new protocols such as 802.11ac, where sync speed is say about 1.3Gbps, I would expect around just below 200 Mbps effective throughput... ie equivalent of two aggregated Fast Ethernet connection... so I use as a very rough indication with a no load wlan of 1 to 6 of Ethernet speed to Wifi sync speed with new devices on a typical consumer setup. Yes in wlan, one can adjust the back of times between radio activity for a particular frame to give effective QoS so some traffic has a greater throughput than others.. but I am not sure most consumer equipment allows you to configure this.... but it is very useful in commercial setups ????

Simon

Huge posted:

The Cisco 2960G xxx series of switches (and some later ones) are Gigabit switches...  so I don't see where the problem is.

Indeed, and even the old 100Mb versions generally have a Gb ‘uplink’ port, so it’s not as if your entire network runs at 100 meg. 

Thanks Simon, Indeed just reminded me of my own personal reasons for choosing the Gigabit switch (I knew I had reasons but I only just remembered what they were)...

For me, the only times Gigabit Ethernet makes a significant difference over Fast Ethernet are transferring an album from download and working storage (the PC's SSD) to the NAS (particularly if it's HiDef album) and also when running manually initiated backups.

(Because of my erratic working patterns I tend to do this quite a bit.)

SimonPeterArnold posted:

Go wirless less mess, less fuss, now worrying about cables, switches. Mine just works and it's the best thing I did. It's sounds identical to what it did before using cable and switches. Just make sure you buy decent kit.

I couldn’t disagree more.  Wired is always at least as good as wireless and in my experience generally better, certainly from a reliability standpoint.  Also, the OP noted that his new house has stone walls, which isn’t a great environment for wifi. Unlike wireless, wired also isn’t going to be affected because your neighbour added a new router using the same wifi channel as you are using. 

I’m also a big fan of wired. Everything in my house that is in a fixed location is wired - Incomming router, NAS, Mail server, NDS, Printer and 2 APs, tablets, phones and MacBook all wireless. Wired gives me much more lively performance, so I’m sticking with it.

Regarding fast Ethernet vs Gigabit, everything on the core switch is gigabit, with a fibre downlink to the  2960 also gigabit. A fast Ethernet port on the 2960 connects to the NDS. As Huge says, gigabit from the iMac to my NAS speeds up bulk transfers, but the max utilisation on my 2960 fast Ethernet port streaming DSD was less than 5%.

Dave