I have a fairly old router that doesn’t support gigabit. I also have a network switch that does support gigabit. If I connect two devices directly to the switch, then connect the switch up to the router, will the connection between the two devices support gigabit? If I’m understanding correctly the router would just act as DHCP server and give the two devices a local IP address, but the actual connection between them wouldn’t go through the router at all.
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yes, that is generally how it works. There are some edge cases and possible misconfigurations that would slow things down, but in general data between the devices on the switch will be gigabit and to/from the router (and thus the internet) will be limited to 100mbit.
to/from the router (and thus the internet) will be limited to 100mbit
Assuming of course that the uplink to the internet is 100M. And that the router with firewalls, tunnels, NAT and all can actually push whole 100M trough. That’s a pretty safe assumption with 100M, but I’ve seen devices which technically hve a gigabit ethernet connection but with real world traffic the routers CPU is a bottleneck and it’ll limit speeds well below that.
NOTHING that a typical home user would buy supports the full 1Gbps. At least, not from my research. This is what’s stopping me from 1Gbps internet. My ISP offers up to 8Gbps but my real world FW throughput is about 700Mbps. I’m not dropping thousands on enterprise hardware either. All that’s left for me is DIY If I want true 10GbE
RB4011iGS+ I have can do (according to routerboard) up to 7Gbps for less than 200€. I’ve been pretty happy with it with my 1G fiber connection and it doesn’t break a sweat while doing that. Granted, I don’t run very complex stuff on the thing, but for me it can saturate the bandwidth I have available. From the ISP side I could go to 10G, but I don’t have any hardware which could manage it, so I’m not interested (at least for now).
I initially had Edge Router X from Ubiquiti, but it stalled at around 700Mbps, so that thing is now glorified POE switch on my network and majority of the traffic goes trough mikrotik router and it’s been rock solid since installation.
