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I'm about to lay Gigabit network cabling in my new house. I want a wired network in almost every room of the house and some with several cables (i.e. living room with LAN for xbox/ps, video LAN cable for STB and possibly additional LAN for media server i.e. Boxee).
House has three floors. Instead of leading all LAN cables to a single point in a house (meaning there would be quite a few cables coming out of the wall), I was thinking of installing:
- 8 port switch in basement connected to ground floor router
- 4 port router on ground floor + additional 8 port switch connected to router
- 8 port switch in 1st floor connected to ground floor router
This creates a simplified cabling topology so that each floor is only connected to ground floor by a single cable.
I'm pretty sure this should be fine. But the devil's always in the details.
Question
What if I need to extend number of LAN clients on any floor later in life and the switch doesn't have the sufficient number of available ports? I know I could buy a switch with more ports but what if I decide to equip a home office in one room. It would make sense to add an additional switch and just lead one cable to floor switch, wouldn't it?
So...
- Can a subsequent switch be connected to existing switch without any particular downgrade? This means that all its connected clients would go through 2 switches to hit the router?
- Will I see network issues due to increased traffic collision?
- Should I be careful when buying switches to keep maximum Gigabit throughput
- Do Layer-2 switches (that do bridging) provide better network traffic control (more directed traffic without flooding) and is it still possible to buy Layer-1 switches at all in Gigabit times?