I’ve been pondering a few things with regard to upgrading my home’s network. Currently I’ve got half a dozen machines on a 10/100 switch that goes into a Linksys router and out to our cable modem. In the midst of upgrading and adding a few new machines to the network, I got off onto a mental tangent about consolidating and upgrading some of the network equipment when I saw that Linksys has a wireless router and cable modem all-in-one deal, so I figured on going with that.
Then I got to thinking (and here’s where the question comes in) whether or not there is such a thing as a cable modem with a Gigabit (GB) port? I realize most of the cheaper GB switches are simply 10/100 switches with a single GB uplink for plugging into a server to handle higher traffic loads … but what about a cable modem? What is the “theoretical” limit to the transfer speeds of a cable connection, anyway? I figured if a cable modem had GB transfer ability, you could take even more advantage of its bandwidth. Maybe I’m reaching, but if cable modems aren’t even capable of maxing out the transfer speed on a 100Mbps interface, then I guess there’s no benefit in plugging one of them into a GB network switch. Seems like the only advantage of the GB interface would be for a server to handle more incoming data at a faster rate, and it wouldn’t help much with a high-speed connection that’s limited by a 100Mbps interface, right?
Seems obvious, but I thought I’d ask. 