Quality difference?

[Randell Floyd]

Right this ones ever so slightly long winded!


Current set-up is

Room 1 :

ADSL Box ( original not a microfilter ) ----> RJ11 connected into a Draytek ADSL Router/4port/Firewall .


So the 4 ports in the draytek are like so....

Port 1 - Cat5 straight into my computer that's 2m away
Port 2 - This is the difficult one!

Port 2 ----> Cat5 into a wall socket port that runs up to the attic were it connects to a 4 port hub, then a new cat5 from that 4 port hub runs to the conservatory.



Now the question I have is...... I need to relocate to a room across to the other side of the house.

If I get a connection via the 4port hub that's in the loft, will the quality of the line be noticably worse? I play a average amount of on-line gaming so ping plays a little in the equation.


It initially bothers me that there's so much cable and hardware between me and the origin of the ADSL.

[arthurleung]

Hubs and switches won't do anything to the signal. As long as your cat5 cable length is not over 100m for any of the section you would be fine. With a hub in between you can expect 0.5ms extra max when the hub is not at load, and may be 20ms extra when you are transferring full speed over lan.

The only thing is since a hub is pretty small, you might accidentially kicked it so it lose power, loose cables, etc.

[aidanjt]

I wouldn't worry too much about cat5 cable lenght so long as each cable segment between active hubs/switches doesn't exceed 100m as arthurleung said, you could run cat5 cable for 1km (with repeaters at 100m gaps) and you still wouldn't notice any real increeses in ping times..
The only problem comes from signal degredation, which will corrupt your packets and require resends, that'll throw up delay like nobodies business, just keep the cat5's 1 foot or more away from mains power lines and you shouldn't have much of a problem with interference corrupting packets.

Since you don't have that many nodes on your home network the hub will do fine, so long as it supports full-duplex operation you shouldn't worry about packet collisions driving up delay time that much.
With that said, however, you could just throw your router up in the loft and use it to switch packets, its a more efficent operation, but you need to ensure that the cabling running from the telephone entry point to the loft doesn't exceed 30m, with a little wire trickery you can get double rj45 socket and use the cable already running up the wall to the loft for both sockets (yes, rj11's plug into rj45 sockets, and telephone signals going up cat5 cable is execellent).

Plenty of choice, hope that helps somewhat.