Question 100 over 100 fibre cyber cafe setup.

[Team Av It]

I'm setting up 12 mid range gaming PCs controlled from a main PC. I've arranged installation of 100 / 100 dedicated fibre optic connection. (£2400 government grant helped) and need advice on the best network hardware to provide the ultimate gaming experience to my customers.

 

[bill001g]

Buy a 16 port 10/100/1000 switch and connect all the devices to it via ethernet. If you are running local lan games you should have a full gigabit between all machines. If you are running internet based games the internet connection is your bottleneck. In general the router is not real critical since you only have 100mbit internet. Most routers can easily do that. I would still buy one with gigabit wan and lan ports just because the cpu in those routers is more powerful also.

Other than that you need nothing real special. I would lock the machines down so nobody can install any software but you. You might want to install some kind of bandwidth control app but as long as people can not install software it will prevent most abuse. You don't want to let some idiot kid load bit torrent and overload you internet connection.

 

[Team Av It]

Cheers, I've already decided to install Deepfreeze on all the PCs. How can a dedicated leased fibre connection be a bottle neck though? It's 100Mbps on 100Mbps fcs. Decided to go with a Netgear GS716T ProSafe 16 Port Gigabit Smart Switch with 2 x SFP uplinks.

 

[bill001g]

It all depends on how you have the games installed. Actually playing games will not likely overload the connection. Problem comes if someone installs a new game or if some large patch from something like steam gets forced to a machine. A single machine can use 100mbps easily downloading games. When you consider some games are over 50gbyte it can degrade the connection for a long time.

What you need to figure out how to do is prevent downloads from degrading the other pc. Many things you can load on the end pc to control this but it is something you need to think about.

 

[Team Av It]

It all depends on how you have the games installed. Actually playing games will not likely overload the connection. Problem comes if someone installs a new game or if some large patch from something like steam gets forced to a machine. A single machine can use 100mbps easily downloading games. When you consider some games are over 50gbyte it can degrade the connection for a long time.

What you need to figure out how to do is prevent downloads from degrading the other pc. Many things you can load on the end pc to control this but it is something you need to think about.

Good point, update scheduling for closed hours sounds the way forward. Turning auto-updates off will also help. I'm going to make game installation by request only so I can do it as part of daily maintenance.