For many people internet and network connectivity is some sort of magic. Somehow the world exists at the end of a keyboard, no need to explain further. But some have a bit more curiosity about networking and the internet and this is for them.
Home Network Fundamentals
For home networking, your Internet Service Provider will provide internet connectivity to your front door. Without diving into the technology used to deliver it, lets imagine its like the plumbing, there is a “pipe” which might be a fibre, copper wire, coaxial cable, maybe wireless, connected to a router inside your house. The non-internet side of the router is your home network, the Local Area Network (LAN). This is the part I’ll talk about today.
Connected to your LAN will be your TV, mobile phones, computers, ipads, fridge, cooktop, PV – all the things. While some of these will connect via wifi, some will be connected by an ethernet cable. All of these things have a unique IP address (identifier) on your network and make their way back to the router which decides where the ethernet traffic needs to go which might be from device to device on your network, to the internet or both.
For example, lets say the dishwasher wants to let me know it’s done with the dishes. It will reach out through my network to the manufacturer’s server via the internet, identify my account, send the message to the server which forwards the message to my mobile device on my home network. A similar thing occurs if I want to use Spotify from a mobile device or computer at home.
2.5GbE explainer
But what about this 2.5GbE thing I hear you ask. Your ISP will provide internet at a certain speed which is the rate at which data travels between your devices and the internet, measured in megabits per second (Mbps) and the faster it is the more data you can transfer in a shorter amount of time. Bigger numbers are better for browsing and in particular streaming and file transfer. However the speed is in most cases going to be a lot less than your LAN speed.
On the LAN side most wired equipment will have an 1GbE ethernet port, 1000Mbs. This translates to a more familiar 125 MB/s megabytes per second which represents either way the throughput of the network connectivity. 1GbE has been the LAN standard for a long time and plenty good enough – unless you have a need to move a lot of big files very quickly. That’s where 2.5 and 10GbE network speeds start making sense. It’s not going to help one bit for internet though, the ISP speed typically will be much lower.
Click here for a handy converter and explainer.
The small switch that comes with the router will typically be 1GbE. What’s needed for 2.5GbE network speeds are computers with 2.5 or 10 GbE network connectivity and a suitable switch. 2.5 GbE is currently the sweetspot for price/performance, 10GbE is still a decent step up price wise.
What equipment is required?
I’ve chosen a UniFi 2.5 GbE POE powered 5 port switch since it was inexpensive and fits right into my existing UniFi network, but there are many brands to choose from at various price points. Some offer better performance than others so if your switch is going to be thrashed with a high volume of traffic, get a better brand that can handle it. Look at the backplane speed in the manufacturer’s specifications to make sure you get the performance you expect since some devices supply “up to” 2.5GbE rather than being able to run all ports flat out at full speed.
My PC and NAS had native 2.5GbE network adapters, the Mac has an external adapter which was relatively inexpensive. The entire uplift was affordable and provided a huge performance and productivity benefit for my imaging workstations.
Do I need 2.5GbE?
Is this something everyone needs to contemplate? I doubt it, especially if you are using your computer for browsing and a bit of email. But if you have an application where the additional performance on the LAN makes sense, then it’s well worth investigating.
