[SOLVED] Use just 1 LAN or all 4

[liderbug]

Tp-Link AC1750 A7
Yesterday our fiber line was connected (Weeeeeeeeee)(100/100)(up from 15/.8). I placed the router on the main floor in about the center of the house for the WiFi. I have one lan cable running downstairs to a 8 port hub (TV, Sattv, Xbox, etc) with 2 outgoing lines: 1 to the computer room hub (4 devices) and 1 to the garage/greenhouse hub (3 devices). Now there's not a huge load of traffic but would I see any improvment if I were to use the LAN ports on the router directly to the 3 hubs. So, Lan1 -> TV hub, Lan2 -> computer room, Lan3 -> gar/greenhouse.

Thanks

 

[RealBeast]

I will assume that your switches (hubs) have gigabit ports like your router and you use CAT5/5e/6?

Without much traffic you will not see any difference, the only thing that I would expect to be a potential improvement is if there is a slower device in the middle of the path of a file transfer, like a Fast Ethernet (100Mbps) switch that links two gigabit switches, and then only for larger files where time to transfer a file would be higher at the slower speed of Fast Ethernet

 

[liderbug]

Thanks. Hmmm.... I have a spool of cat-5 & connectors & time - but do I have the analness to run 2 more lines - horns of a dilemma desissions desissions

 

[bill001g]

It depends on the actual port speeds. If the LAN ports on the router as well as your switches are all gigabit it likely does not matter a lot.
If the lan ports on the router are 100m but all your switches are gigabit then connecting to the 8 port switch would be best. This allows all the traffic between your machines to run at gigabit but if you were to hook it via a router that only has 100m ports then traffic between your machines would be bottlenecked by these slow ports in the path.

Now if you are doing crazy stuff that can actually fully saturate gigabit ports for longs times maybe a different design would help.

It all depends on how much traffic you have between machines in your house. If you just consider internet usage then the internet is the bottleneck and your LAN likely doesn't matter no matter how bad you set it up even with switches that are not gigabit.

My recommendation if the 8 port switch is not already gigabit maybe replace that. 8 port gigabit switches are very cheap, maybe $5 more than a 10/100