Originally posted by Clinton:
John, if you are looking for the opinion of senior professionals and gurus, I think you will find that most are somewhat horrified by a product that encourages people to ignore standards and best practice. Splitting one cable into two Ethernet connections will usually work, but anyone concerned with quality workmanship will not do this. Period. I have been asked to do things like this for clients in the past and I refused. I have a feeling most members of this board would do the same.
If you focus on moving little 10MB files over the network, then yes, gigabit seems like overkill. When I deploy a >40GB image to a workstation, I'm pretty happy to have it. When any IT department has to roll software out to 500 workstations, gigabit can save quite a few man hours. I deal with .VHD files and DVD .ISO files all the time that are >4GB, and even gigabit seems slow when I need to copy them to my lab machines. Does this represent all networks? No it doesn't. Some people do less with their network and some do more, but why would you close the door on higher speeds? We have standards which allow for scalability and compatibility with future technologies. What reasonable person would do the opposite?
The scenario you depict for link aggregation is not at all realistic. All you are doing here is giving examples of how to do things completely wrong. This doesn't prove that gigabit is pointless, it just proves that you are really good at inventing silly scenarios where things don't work properly. Your 10 port link aggregation is a wonderful straw man argument, but it completely misses the point.
You have a product that isn't capable of gigabit, so gigabit isn't necessary. You can't do link aggregation, so that's a useless technology as well. Your switch is unmanaged, so anything that requires configuring is just overly complicated and difficult. Does your cable splitter support POE, or is that another pointless technology that nobody needs?
Long live standards based cable plants and well designed networks. Gigabit capability will be there whether you need it or not.
Hi Clinton. First I would like to thank you and all other people who expressed their opinion to my question, either negative or positive and also who read my these posts. The last thing I want to see is no one cares and no one responds.
Now, I would like to explain a little bit more.
1) 10MB vs 4GB. The reason I used 10MB as the file size, not 4GB, is because I believe 10MB is probably already much larger than the average file size of files (including email, documents, pictures, audio and video) that are being daily transferred over a typical company's network. I remember I read somewhere that the average file size traveling over the Internet was much less than 100KB.
2) In a scenario that you install DVD-size software on a remote station over network, I guess the bottleneck might not be 100M vs. 1G. The whole thing may be just more slow down by CPU reading and writing to HDD.
3) "Gigabit to Desktop" does have its attractiveness for some special or niche applications such as doing movie special effects, just as the original article I referenced in my fist post indicated. But to majority of users, it is an over-kill, and it will be such for many years to come until daily average file size over network becomes larger, say 100MB, and I don't know when that would happen.
4)The 10-port link aggregation was indeed exaggerated, but it was partially used to point to the fact that there are no 10G uplink ports available on most gigabit Ethernet switches that you can buy today. This is a weakness that has been "ignored" by those who hype "gigabit to desktop".
5) It seems that you have some mis-understanding of our cableshare Ethernet switch. The cableshare switch product family can be a managed switch, can do link aggregation, and can have uplink ports of gigabit rate. It can support PoE too. It is also in full compliance with IEEE 802.3 Ethernet standards. Also, the cabling is the same as you cables regular Ethernet switches, meaning that there is no cable splitting along the cabling from patch panel to each drop of RJ45 wall plates. In other words, you get the same workmanship as you do for normal switches.
6) I guess you may be not comfortable with running two Ethernet signals within one network cable, which may be what you considered as a non-standard approach. Cisco actually has their 6500 switches that do cable sharing ( see
Cisco Cable Sharing Switch ). In the past,people concerned about cross-talk degrading signal quality, this concern was valid for Cat3 and Cat5, but CAT5e and CAT6 are much better constructed in reducing the cross-talk.
Hope the above may be helpful.