Does adding multiple switches hurt internet speed?

[smokey982]

Here's my situation. I have cable internet, and my desktop computer, cable modem, and wireless router are all located in one of my bedrooms (office). A couple years ago I ran a cat5 cable under the floor from that room to my living room where I have a switch with 4 or 5 outputs. From that switch I have ethernet cables feeding my hopper, Xbox 360, google tv, and DVD player. Well now my daughter wants to swap her bedroom with the room that's used for an office. No problem, it's a bigger room and she needs the space. So now my computer and such will be moved to a diferent bedroom that has no internet access or cat5 cabling at all. Now getting internet in that room is not a problem. I have RG6 in there that I can use for my cable internet. But getting another cat5 run from that room to the living room is a problem.

The easiest cable run would be from bedroom to bedroom. So my question is (finally), can I run an ethernet cable from the new bedroom to the other bedroom, install another switch, and come out of that switch and into the switch currently in the living room? Is there a rule about "stacking" switches? How much will it affect my internet speed and the end of the line (living room)?

 

[StevenD]

You will be fine and wont notice a thing...especially if you are using gigabit all the way round.

 

[smokey982]

You will be fine and wont notice a thing...especially if you are using gigabit all the way round.

I don't know what that means. I know just enough about this to really screw something up, lol.

 

[mike123abc]

Modern switches should not have any issues. Only possible issues would be computer to computer file transfers if they are on separate switches could bottle neck the connection. This is unlikely in a home computer environment since there tends to be very little file copying between computers. Since you are probably running at least 100mbit, any internet connection is probably slower than 100mbit, so no bottlenecks.

 

[LER]

It will work just fine.

 

[John Kotches]

all of the answers here are very accurate.
there are some absolute compromises in theoretical performance however from a practical perspective this is likely of little concern to you.

Theoretically the available aggregate bandwidth to the cascaded links is limited to the connection speed of the switch interlinked speeds. or put another way , if you connect 2 rooms together , the most you can push between the two rooms is that single link speed between all computers. its shared bandwidth. practically speaking, if you aren't doing large file transfers between rooms on cascaded switches it won't make a real world difference.

i would recommend running cat 5e or cat 6 so that you will be gigabit capable. if you don't need the cables right away you can get great deals from the usual internet sources.

Sent from my MB855 using Tapatalk 2

 

[Neutron]

Your bottleneck will be your Internet connection speed. I echo those who say you wont see a problem. Gigabit is the normal switch speed nowadays.

Gigabit is 1000 Mbps. The fastest Internet connection offered for residential is nowhere near that.

 

[navychop]

Switch = no problem.

Now, if you had an old hub laying around, you'd definitely see a slowdown.