MobAttack

Noobish networking question: I need to buy a new wireless router, my current Belkin is 5 or 6 years old and dying often. I am looking at routers and I notice not a lot of 1000M networking in them. I was thinking 'who'd want to stick with only 100', but then it came to me, my internet connection is much lower than 100 anyways, so its not needed, as long as I have a my computers connected to a 1000 switch right?

This does make me question sending data to the networked wireless devices, will they all be locked at 100 only, and not getting the benefit of a gigabit network?

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radodrill

Most wireless standards are physically not capable of exceeding 100mbps (the only one that is is wireless N)

Having all gigabit enabled PCs on a switch that's piggybacked off a 100megabit router will allow gigabit communication between those PCs; but their combined link to the router will be limited to a single 100megabit line, which could cause slowdowns when transferring between one of the PCs and a wireless client.

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tubesaddict

Different protocols. 1000 Megabit is only for the wired portion of the router. Say you have wireless G, that is only 54 Megabit. N has a bitrate of 600 Megabit. Either way, your wireless will see no benefit of a Gigabit router.

MobAttack

Thanks guys. That is what I was assuming, so thanks for confirming it. Now I dont have to fear when buying a non 1000 megabit router.

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MrAMD_Fan

What rado said is correct.... i have a 100Mb router connected to my cable modem on the WAN side and connected to my gigabit switch on the LAN side. Then all pc are plugged into the gigabit switch. So all data transfers between pc (wired) would be at 1000Mb. As was mentioned before, all wireless data transfers would be going at the slower speed going back to the router via wireless and then going to the other pc at 100Mb.

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max302

You might want to read a blog article I wrote awhile back when I switched from a 100 mbps router to gigabit.

Gigabit is totally worth it, even if you only have two wired computers that support it. Got 90 mega BYTES per second the other day while transferring stuff from my server to my PC. Needless to say, I was undergoing a pretty serious nerdgasm.

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ComGuards

Just to clarify, there *are* routers available with both gigabit on the LAN and WAN ports. From a simple SOHO perspective, there's no real point to the gigabit on the WAN, since SOHO internet connections are going to be limited. These devices would, however, come in handy if the router was used to bridge two separate networks together if both were already gigabit.

If you're running Wireless-N, you should probably at least consider getting a router with gigabit LAN, assuming you're going to have wired clients.