Wireless 5Ghz AP to Gigabit switch?

antispam246

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Hi, I have a setup query.

I have a wireless AP using only 5Ghz mode (300Mbps), this wireless AP has gigabit LAN. I have 3 devices attached to this wireless AP all running at 300Mbps (99% stable) on 5Ghz -n (obviously attached wirelessly).

As it's acting as an AP I have it connected directly to my gigabit switch.

My gigabit switch has 3 wired devices on on gigabit.

The gigabit switch then runs into modem router.

My query is, will having the AP setup like this (running directly into the gigabit switch) have any detrimental effect on the gigabit performance across the switch (i.e. the 3 gigabit devices attached to it).

From what I can recall, for the gigabit switch to function at gigabit speeds, all attachements must be on/support gigabit. This allows the 3 devices attached to it to transfer at gigabit speeds directly to one another.

However, although the wireless AP is attached to it via it's gigabit port, I'm worried that because it's feeding through a maximum 300Mbps from the 5Ghz wireless devices, whether this will slow down the transfers between the wired devices on the switch?

If you need me to clarify, please ask, I know it's abit all over the place with explaining.
 
no, its all perfectly fine - as long as you have a gigabit port connected to a gigabit port then communications between the two will be at that rate
 
What about connecting a client on the routers separate 2.4ghz network which would also feed through the gigabit router?
 
As Mark says, your AP will have no detrimental effect on the Gigabit switch and your other Gigabit attached devices. If you had, say:

Gb switch <--> 100Mb switch <--> Gb switch

then that would (assuming you reach the limits of the 100Mb switch) have an impact on traffic between the Gb switches (and the Gb devices attached to them).

In short, it's all fine. The limiting factor you do have are the wireless attached devices as they are sharing the 300Mb link between them...
 
What about connecting a client on the routers separate 2.4ghz network which would also feed through the gigabit router?

Won't matter either. If your AP connects to switch at gigabit rate, all switch-->AP, AP-->switch transfers will be at gigabit rates, irrespective of what speed the AP sends/recieves it's wifi transfers.

The rate of the AP's wifi and the rate of it's ethernet are completely independent of each other.

It's a foible of data networking that the transmission "rate" on a link and the "throughput" are subtly different things. Imagine you had two roads either side of a junction ------O------ and the left road had a speed (rate) of 50mph and the right road had a speed (rate) of 100mph and let's say you were trying to transfer as much traffic as possible from left to right (full capacity.)

If you watched it, you see traffic nose to tail on the left road at 50mph, but as it hit the right road (with double the rate) the traffic would "spread out" with gaps between each car because the left road doesn't have the capacity to supply enough cars to fill up the right road. ******O-*-*-* (the asterisks are my cars.)

So the overall throughput is as if both roads are 50mph, but the "rate" at which cars travel right road is 100mph, what you end up with is bigger gaps between cars on the right.

Adding an extra feeder road on the left at 25mph will be fine, ======O------ as the combination of both left roads still can't supply enough traffic to fill the right road up, albeit that the throughput of the right road would increase from 50 cars an hour to 75 cars an hour (right roads rate has remained the same, 100mph, but it's throughput has gone up.)

(Of course this is all rather simplified illustration, real world there are other factors.)
 
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Thanks guys for clearing this up, one more quick question.

Can I still enable jumbo frames on the clients attached to the gigabit switch that support it even if one doesn't?

To clarify;

3 clients are wired directly to the gigabit switch, all support jumbo frames
1 client is wireless which doesn't support jumbo frames but links to the AP that in turn links to the gigabit switch through the AP's gigabit port.

Can I enable jumbo frames for transfering between the 3 clients that support it or would the fact that one client that is indirectly attached to it and not supporting jumbo frames cause me issues?

Would it only cause issues if the wireless client is transferring at the same time? So I could still use jumbo frames aslong as the wireless client wasn't reading/writing across then network?
 
Jumbo and non-jumbo devices can exist in the same network (subnet), but they cannot properly talk to the other type. In your scenario, the 3 jumbo devices would work fine together. At the same time the non-jumbo wifi client would be OK to the router. However the 3 jumbos would NOT talk to the router or the wifi devices. If you don't need to mix traffic between the types then in theory on a switched network it could work without interference, but in practice it is a bad idea.

If you have spare time and money, you could split your network, then build yourself a dedicated PC-based router which could handle your jumbo and standard traffic on seperate NICs, so everything would be able to talk to evevrything else at the best speed available. :D
 

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