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Gigabit switch on a non-gigabit router?

I have a fairly old router that doesn’t support gigabit. I also have a network switch that does support gigabit. If I connect two devices directly to the switch, then connect the switch up to the router, will the connection between the two devices support gigabit? If I’m understanding correctly the router would just act as DHCP server and give the two devices a local IP address, but the actual connection between them wouldn’t go through the router at all.

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7 comments
  • yes, that is generally how it works. There are some edge cases and possible misconfigurations that would slow things down, but in general data between the devices on the switch will be gigabit and to/from the router (and thus the internet) will be limited to 100mbit.

    • to/from the router (and thus the internet) will be limited to 100mbit

      Assuming of course that the uplink to the internet is 100M. And that the router with firewalls, tunnels, NAT and all can actually push whole 100M trough. That's a pretty safe assumption with 100M, but I've seen devices which technically hve a gigabit ethernet connection but with real world traffic the routers CPU is a bottleneck and it'll limit speeds well below that.

      • NOTHING that a typical home user would buy supports the full 1Gbps. At least, not from my research. This is what's stopping me from 1Gbps internet. My ISP offers up to 8Gbps but my real world FW throughput is about 700Mbps. I'm not dropping thousands on enterprise hardware either. All that's left for me is DIY If I want true 10GbE

  • Yep, that should work fine. I have a mix of Gbit and 100mbit devices and a Gbit switch, each device negotiates the best link they support.

7 comments