Home Networking

189 readers

1 users here now

A community to help people learn, install, set up or troubleshoot their home network equipment and solutions.

Rules

Please stay on topic.
Please use the search function to look for keywords related to what you want to ask before posting since most common issues have been answered.
No Ads. This community is for support and discussion. Ads and self promotion are not welcome here.
No product reviews or announcements. If you have a question about a product, be specific about what you want to know.
Be civil. Don't be a jerk. Not being a jerk is surprisingly easy.
No URL shorteners. URL shorteners tend to hide the real use of a link. For this reason, please use normal links, even if they're long.
No affiliate links.
No gatekeeping. With profession shall come professionalism. Extend help without judging others for their ignorance. The same goes for downvoting of comments or posts for "stupid questions" or not being as knowledgeable as others.

founded 10 months ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Router vs Switch - I am still confused (alien.top)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

15 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Probably a very basic question but confused the hell out of me - say if I have 100mb internet at home, and scenario one, a router with 100mb port speed and I connect two PCs to it, each has a 100mb NIC card, is it true that ignoring other factors I should be able to get close to, if not 100mb connection on each of the PCs? On the other hand, scenario 2, if I have a (unmanaged) switch and I connect the PCs to the switch I would only ended up getting 50mb each on each of the PCs (i.e., the switch essentially "halved" my internet speed if I connect 2 PCs to it, 1/3 if I connect 3 PCs to it, etc)?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

There's another variable here, which is the behavior that TCP and UDP flows have on each other. There are a number of TCP congestion management algorithms that have been developed over the years. This paper, for example, shows that BBR congestion control is very unfair to CUBIC. IOW, if one PC is using BBR and another CUBIC, the first PC will hog most of the bandwidth.

Similarly, QUIC, which is a UDP-based alternative to TCP originally developed by Google and used a lot by Chrome, is quite unfair to TCP as the images show.

Anyway, this is a bit off topic. The main point that the network is only as fast as the slowest link is correct.