It refers to a data transmission rate of one gigabit per second, which is equivalent to 1,000 megabits per second.
It refers to a data transmission rate of one gigabit per second, which is equivalent to 1,000 megabits per second.
Giga is a term used to denote a billion bits, or one eighth of a byte. It refers to speeds of one billion bits per second. Giga-bit, gigabit, and switching capacity are all tied to the compute power of the switch. Even budget-friendly Gigabit switches typically allow ports to communicate at line speed, though this detail is often missing from low-end models. Enterprise-grade rack-mounted managed switches usually offer substantial switching capacity, and their documentation readily shares these specifications.
A switch usually allows each port to transmit and receive data at the line speed, meaning an 8-port switch can handle all ports sending and receiving at 1 gigabit per second simultaneously.
Thanks in advance. I plan to investigate differences among off-the-shelf switches, focusing on specific aspects. I’ll share my results once ready.
Enterprise switches have number of ports *2 of switching capacity. This is an UniFi 8 port 2.5GbE switch + 2 SFP So note the switching capacity is 8 x 10Gb. The 2 SFP ports are not included in this as they're usually not connected to "the switch" Now look at the "non-blocking throughput, this is how much can go across without inducing latency. So realistically there is enough bandwidth for full-duplex use if the SFP's aren't used. If the SFP's are used, then they might consume the bandwidth of a single port. You'll find similar specifications on enterprise switches. Now, consumer switches, like those on your router, are not the same. Realistically, you only ever see 4 or 5 ports, so the combined switching bandwidth is usually similar, however that doesn't include the MAC's of the "modem" side of the router (eg WAN port, or DSL or Copper/Fiber SFP) Like if you buy "just a switch", the best way to think of it is an X port-wide highway that has a traffic light at the end to do a U-turn onto another lane (for another port.) If however you have a router, the "Switch" is eclectically connected as a single port. So if you have 8 10Gbe ports, but the SFP plugged in is 1GBe, then any traffic destined to the SFP only goes at the speed of the SFP. So if you have 40GBits of traffic flying around, that 40GBits may occasionally be interrupted by traffic from the SFP port. If you look at a block diagram of a switch, vs a router, a router is simply a "switch" with one port connected to a computer. So each PHY in this case is 4 ports, and those are connected to another higher bandwidth switch. Here's another example https://www.eetimes.com/fpga-based-ether...lications/ Now compare to a wireless router https://www.eeworldonline.com/teardown-i...ss-router/ It's actually really hard to find block diagrams of routers that don't look super complicated. Basically routers are "computers" with an ethernet switch. Where as a switch is pretty much self-contained when it's unmanaged, and when it's managed it resembles a router. Now the last thing to mention are "hubs" and "access points" Ethernet "hubs" haven't really been a thing since 10Mbit. You may still find them. Unlike a switch, a hub only allows one connection to speak, and thus if two devices try to speak, they "Collide" and have to retry. Hence why hubs are kinda useless unless everything you plug in is expected to listen (eg printers), not constantly communicate. "Access points", basically look the same as a wireless router but lack the switch ports. Back before 802.11b took off, you usually had to buy an access point to plug into a 10/100 switch. Presently 802.11n and later are usually integrated into ISP routers which basically whatever the ISP servers(DSL, Fiber, Cable, etc) on one MAC, The WiFi on another MAC, and then a 4 or 5 port switch. So to answer your question is "only the devices plugged into the switch directly" have access to the full switching bandwidth. Like if you plug in two switches, eg one 4 port switch to another 4 port switch, the 3 devices plugged into the switch 1 can communicate through that 40Gbits of switch bandwidth, but if it has to talk to a device on the other switch, it will have to share that port's 10Gb with everything on both switches. This only gets worse when you add more switches. Hence, you are better off buying a larger switch than you need if you will be using a lot of devices that will be communicating simultaneously. Such as file servers. If you're just worried about internet bandwidth, then the choke point will be the MAC connected to the internet. Most people will not need anything bigger than an 8 port switch, and if your ISP modem isn't as fast as you need it, you are better off buying an 8-12 port switch, and then plugging just one port on it into the ISP modem. This also gets into the "what happens if I plug in two ports from two switches", on enterprise switches, this doubles the bandwidth, but on consumer switches this isn't guaranteed since the switch logic is usually end-to-end, where as an enterprise managed switch is effectively routing it. At any rate. If you're just buying a switch to be able to connect everything in a room to your network, you can just do that, and you're fine. Only if you need to connect to specific devices (Eg file servers, media servers) do you need to consider the switching bandwidth, because Ethernet is slower than a directly attached storage device due to latency and software on either side.
Visit servethehome for detailed testing. Demonstrates maximum performance across all switch evaluations. Shows an 8-port setup using 2.5Gbps, featuring one 10Gb port.
I attempted to update the list myself. The link provided points to a page about switching on YouTube, but it doesn’t directly relate to organizing a Switch review playlist.