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10/100 or GIG

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by jonathanty

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I am helping a church build a network for a new building that they have just begun construction on. They will have your typical office help needing file and print sharing with about 8 users Monday through Friday. A Cisco UCSB 500 series VOIP system. The plan is for the existing building they are occupying now to be set on the same domain as the new building. There will be two locations with one DC. There will be wireless domain access throughout the entire 40k sq ft. There will be a coffee bar, open Monday-Friday, with free wireless internet connection for the coffee shop. They will also have live video streaming in the daycare. Each parent will be able to access live streaming video of their child?s classroom, from the internet. Each of the 15 daycare rooms will be equipped with an IP camera. I was proposing GIG switches. Others have suggested that with CAT6 cabling we could do just fine with 10/100 switches. Can I get some personal experience and suggestions? Am I proposing an over kill with GIG switches? Thank you for your help!!

11 replies

by Former member

So you can have the cake and Eat it too.
So go for the 10/100/1000 auto switch boxes. :)

Please post back if you have anymore problems or questions.

by jonathanty

Can you give me anymore information on the auto switch boxes? I tried a google search but that turned up nothing? Can you tell me where to find out more about this? Thanks

by jellimonsta

It depends on the price break for the 10/100 vs. 1GB. If you were quoting Cisco 1GB Ethernet, the price break is quite significant.
If you are using a Cisco VoIP system, I would personally recommend Cisco switches (so you can verify QoS). In that case I would most likely go with 10/100 Ethernet with 1GB uplinks.
General office traffic does not need 1GB, and the video access and Internet will be limited by the bandwidth from the ISP.
You will want to bear in mind what switch connectivity you need, and whether you are going with a collapsed core environment (which I would recommend in this scenario as it sounds small). If you have multiple switches you will most likely want a 1GB fiber backbone between the switches.
If you want to make sure any servers are not bottlenecked you can go with 1GB SFP or GBIC to the server. For a small environment I would just usually recommend you use smaller Cisco 10/100 switches with 1GB SPF and auto-qos for voice.
Good luck.

by jonathanty

The user count will be small however the network will be busy. But maybe what I am thinking of busy is not as busy for a 10/100 as I perceive. There will be video streaming out of 10 to 15 classrooms. That data will be be streaming across my network and in addition to that we will retain two weeks? worth of the live video feed in storage therefore the network will be handling all of that on a Monday - Friday 12 hours a day. In addition to that there will be a public coffee shop with wireless connectivity for all also open Monday - Friday 12 hours a day. Then we have our 10-12 users at the main campus plus another 20 to 30 users at our satellite campus. 20 of those 30 will be a computer lab where downloads are expected to be on the heavy side. It can and will be managed but it is still expected to be on the heavy side. Are you still of the opinion that this is on the lean side for network traffic? Thank you for taking the time to assist me in this project.

by jdclyde

I would put the cabling in place to handle the gigibit later on, but for eight users, I would do the 10/100 on the switches and save the money until you actually would benefit from it.

by jonathanty

The user count will be small however the network will be busy. But maybe what I am thinking of busy is not as busy for a 10/100 as I perceive. There will be video streaming out of 10 to 15 classrooms so that live streaming will be streaming across our network on its way to the file server for storage. We will retain two weeks? worth of the live video feed in storage. The network will be handling all of that, Monday - Friday 12 hours a day. In addition to that there will be a public coffee shop with wireless connectivity for all, also open Monday - Friday 12 hours a day. Then we have our 10-12 users at the main campus plus another 20 to 30 users at our satellite campus. 20 of those 30 will be a computer lab where downloads are expected to be on the heavy side. It can and will be managed but it is still expected to be on the heavy side. What are your thoughts on the network traffic? Thank you for taking the time to assist me in this project.

by dibthree

It would be a huge mistake to install outdated technology. You cannot have too much bandwidth. You can?t go wrong with Gig especially when you consider everything you are going to have running over that network.
Make sure who ever does the cabling has it ?certified? at Cat6. You can spend all the money in the world on expensive Systemax cable, and if it is not installed right you wasted your money. Getting a cable to ?certify? Cat 6 can be difficult. The cable must be installed properly for it to pass the test. Require your cable vendor to give you the test results from a Fluke DTX-1800 (or another one of the level 3 or 4 cable certifiers).
But there are much more important long term issues to think about. Because you are giving internet access to the public you have legal liabilities. There have been some interesting court cases on this.
For your public users connecting in places like your coffee bar:
All you need is one script kid sitting in the coffee bar to have a law suit. Or worse yet someone could sit in the parking lot and steal identities.
How will you be redirecting their browsers to the EULA? Do you know what your EULA needs to say?
How will you handle port security on your wireless network so that users can?t see one another? If I connect to the wireless network and run an Angry-Scan who and what will I see?
Do you have the two networks physically completely separated or is the Church sharing resources like access points, switches, and the internet with the public? If so how will you keep your public users from accessing the Church network?
With an install like this the hardware won?t be cheap but with the liabilities you really don?t want it to be. You want to be able to stand up in court and say you did everything that was possible to protect your public users and to warn them about the risks of using public internet access.
Of course you will also need to keep up the maintenance with the manufacturer to keep the IOS on your hardware up to date. Just like with any other OS once there is a known hack you have to patch it to close the hole. But if you are using Cisco phone systems you already know that.
No matter how much you save by going with cheap hardware it will never make up the cost of a single law suit.
Good luck. Hope this helps.

by jonathanty

Thank you!! You have provided some great information. I was not aware of the CAT6 cert issue and I'll be sure to add this to my list. I had not thought about the EULA. The daycare will also produce some legal liabilities. We intend to retain 2 weeks worth of video feed in storage.

by larryd4

If their is no reall issue with budget why worry with speed, go gigabit and be done with it.

by jonathanty

That was my thought but there will always be bean counters and then there are those who want the cheap way out every time. I just didn't want to overlook something.

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