Greetings all,
I’ve searched and searched, but can’t seem to come to a good conclusion yet, and would appreciate any switched packets experts who could comment. 🙂
We have a number of campuses, each with a number of classrooms, who use a 3Meg ADSL connection to get to the net.
In addition to the classrooms doing basic browsing and some downloading, we also have a number of thin clients (Windows 2000 Terminal Services using RDP) running in the admin offices. These thin clients are making connections to the head office, over the internet, through the same ADSL from above.
The thin clients only have 10Mb NICs in them, and the same with the hubs in the classrooms (although they may get changed out for 100Mb switches soon).
While bandwidth saturation isn’t a problem, I’m at a quandry as to what you use as a main hub/switch for the closet.
In other words, some are arguing that since the ADSL connection is the tightest bottleneck, it doesn’t matter what I use in the closet… andthat I should re-use an old 10Mb Hub.
From what I read, I am convinced that a 10Mb Switch would at least help to make sure that the latency to the thin clients is reduced as much as possible… but now wonder if a 100Mb switch would help any morebeyond that.
(speed of the backplane, etc, ???)
Dunno… looking for a definitive answer, if anyone has any thoughts. 🙂
Thin clients has a billion little tiny packets, and any latency of these packets is the killer.
Thanks,
Andrew
