Yesterday I was installing a pre loved upgraded computer at a friends house. He has a BT HomeHub thing. I think it is anyway.
I got applingly unrelaible netork activity. On inspection I discovered that this weird clamshell thing had 6 sockets on the back marked VDSL, ADSL, 4 x '100' and one '1G'
Examination of the machine plugged into the 1G revealed that yes, it was connected at gigabit Ethernet speed, but to what? Nothing else was capable of matching that speed.
The cable was moved to 100Mbps and all issues vanished...
Online the only faint justification anyone could come up with was that a file server at 1GPS could service 4 clients at 1000Mbpsd happily and that might be the intention.
Might be a bad cable, had a couple recently that have connected at 1Gb but had bad throughput. The Intel driver for the lan card on this machine has a crude TDR function that spotted they had a poor frequency response. Was suitably impressed :)
That is what they advertise do they not, so do Virgin, ie all the family can use it at the same i time with no slow down. the conclusion one has to make here is that they are all throttled to be sure they do not affect each other. Brian
There's a clue in it saying "BT HomeHub" on the front.
Indeed.
Let's say you plug a server into the gig port, then plug four machines into the 100meg ports, and something else on the wireless, then all five of those request a metric fuckload of data from the server, you're going to get all four 100meg ports plus the wireless hitting maximum throughput, whilst the server's connection will still have some bandwidth left to hammer the ADSL connection.
The uselessness was in providing a gigabit port that didn't actually work...and in providing a port that had little application especially in BTs context where you cant have too many machines on a home network.
As I understand it a 1G output should fall automatically back to a lower speed if the attached device is not a 1G one. Therefore TNP's description seems correct.
One thing that can go wrong with gigabit ethernet ports is that they need all 8 wires to be present in the cable. The patch cables that come with modems very often only have four wires.
It does seem rather a strange switching architecture (4x100Mbps + a single Gbps ported ethernet switch with internal port connections to the two modem types, adsl and vdsl).
I suspect the 4 Fast Ethernet ports are a 'courtesy' option for adsl connection usage with the Gbps switch connection primarily to allow effective use of the higher speed vdsl connection option where the user can simply connect the single Gbps port into a 5 or 8 port Gbit switch if a full speed connection is required to be shared by more than just a single PC.
The VM Superhub used the more normal option of Gbit ports all round for their lan connectivity solution. A much simpler way to futureproof its use on 100Mbps and faster cable connected services. The built in Gbit ethernet switch, like all such switches can cope with the slower
100 and 10 Mbps ethernet connections where it can be safe to assume that a high performance server with a Gbit connection will be able to serve up to 10 PCs all using 100Mbps connections without throttling the performance of those 100Mbps connections (assuming the use of Gbit switch(es) to expand the lan port count sufficiently to serve all ten PCs).
Topologically speaking the built in fast ethernet switch uses a fifth port connection into a 4 port Gbit switch with only a single port exposed to the outside world whilst the remaining 2 internal ports are used to connect to the adsl and vdsl modems. Most probably, all this topology is integrated into a single special chip (despite the existence of seperate ports for both adsl and vdsl connections, I doubt they'd allow both modems to be enabled to allow dual conections
- but, without reading the user guide on this, ICBW).
What happens if you use a seperate switch (Fast Ethernet or Gbit) plugged into the Gbit port and the PC connections transferred from the HomeHub's Fast Ethernet ports over to the seperate switch? Will it work as expected? That is will it just work?
You won't see the benefit of aggregating traffic from the 100Mbps ports into a Gbit port when using a fast ethernet switch, but the test should allow you to determine whether or not it's worth investing in a Gbit switch as an effective work around solution to some unconsionable shortcoming in the HomeHub itself. Otoh, perhaps it just needs to be reconfigured to make it work the way you want it to.
Perhaps it's just a case of having everything plugged in whilst doing a full hardware/settings reset to force a reload of appropriate settings determined by the connected equipment it sees when starting with a fresh slate. Obviously, not something to be attempted without having a full user guide to hand (plus notes of any user settings relating to WiFi pass phrases and the like).
Does it actually matter whether TNP's friend's HomeHub has a faulty 1G port or not, if he has a free 100Mbps port and wasn't using more than 100Mbps anyway? Getting BT to swap it for a not-faulty one might need more testing, but it doesn't sound like he has any plan to do that.
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