On Feb 27, 2015 6:48 PM, "Miles Fidelman" <mfidelman@meetinghouse.net> wrote:
Jack Bates wrote:
On 2/27/2015 2:47 PM, Miles Fidelman wrote:
Folks,
Let's not go overboard here. Can we remember that most corporate and
campus (and, for that matter home) networks are symmetric, at least at the edges. Personally, I figure that by deploying PON, the major carriers were just asking for trouble down the line. It's not like carrier-grade gigE switches are that much more expensive than PON gear.
I'll disagree on the home part. I doubt that most homes are symmetric.
Just to be clear - I'm talking about the local switch/router sitting on a home network, not the connection to the outside world. Last time I looked, commodity gigE switches were symmetric - good for network attached storage, media servers, that sort of thing. (Come to think of it, though, I've never paid attention to whether the WiFi side is symmetric.)
Commodity switches are symmetric for multiple reasons, but the biggest is probably because a server could be on any port and a client on any other port. WiFi has two separate data rate selections. The download could be at 300mbps and the upload only be at 1mbps. Or even the other way. WiFi is also half-duplex, so if the data rate is 300mbps, then the maximum you should expect is 150mbps.