Gigabit Ethernet is now inexpensive and ubiquitous enough for home or small office networks. This week, we look at when Gigabit Ethernet is useful and explore how to add it without having to replace existing network hardware.<\/b><\/p>\n
by Joseph Moran<\/b><\/p>\n
In the beginning there was\u00a0Ethernet<\/a>, and it was good.<\/p>\n But, after a while, it wasn’t quite good enough.<\/p>\n So eventually Ethernet begat\u00a0Fast Ethernet<\/a>, which increased maximum performance tenfold from 10 Mbps to 100 Mbps.<\/p>\n Of course, “fast” is a relative term, so Fast Ethernet ultimately led to\u00a0Gigabit Ethernet<\/a>\u00a0and another order-of-magnitude speed boost, this time to 1000 Mbps (which is, of course, 1 Gigabit).<\/p>\n Gigabit Ethernet has been around for around a decade, but only relatively recently has it gotten inexpensive and ubiquitous enough to be worth considering for the typical home or small office network. This week, we’ll examine when Gigabit Ethernet can be useful and explore how you can add it inexpensively and without having to replace existing network hardware.<\/p>\n What It’s Good For<\/b> But because it allows for a significantly faster connection than 100 Mbps Ethernet, in certain situations Gigabit Ethernet can help increase performance between compatible devices on your wired LAN. Not all network operations will benefit from Gigabit Ethernet, because many common and throughput-intensive ones like streaming audio and video (even HD video) don’t really tax even 100 Mbps Ethernet’s capabilities.<\/p>\n However, if you often have multiple users accessing the same network device, Gigabit Ethernet will provide more total bandwidth to go around, which should in turn result in less congestion and better overall performance. Gigabit Ethernet can also be helpful in situations when large (or a large number of) file transfers are involved, like when you perform backups over the network to a server or a\u00a0NAS<\/a>\u00a0drive.<\/p>\n What You’ll Need<\/b> Upgrading older systems to support Gigabit isn’t prohibitively expensive, because\u00a0PCI<\/a>-based Gigabit network cards can usually be bought for only slightly more than 10\/100 adapters-the former can cost as little as $20 or $25 when purchased online. (Though less common and somewhat more expensive than desktop versions, you can also get Gigabit-compatible Cardbus adapters for notebooks.)<\/p>\n When it comes to NAS devices, Gigabit Ethernet is becoming increasingly common, but it isn’t quite as ubiquitous on them as on computers. Many (though not all) of the NAS devices sold today are Gigabit-compatible, but that NAS you’ve had for a year or two probably isn’t.<\/p>\n
\nBefore we get into the hardware requirements, it’s important to understand when Gigabit Ethernet can offer a benefit and when it can’t. First off, it won’t do anything to speed up things like Web browsing or the uploading and downloading of files from the Internet, because those activities are limited by the speed of your broadband connection, not your local network.<\/p>\n
\nIn order to set up a Gigabit Ethernet network, you need to have devices equipped with Gigabit-compatible network adapters connected through a Gigabit-compatible LAN\u00a0switch<\/a>. As it turns out, Gigabit Ethernet capability has pretty much been standard fare on desktops and notebooks for around five years now, so chances are good that your computers already support it. (The name of a system’s network card\/chip in\u00a0Device Manager<\/b>\u00a0will usually indicate whether it’s Gigabit-compatible or not.)<\/p>\n