🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <7ww24BAvpgD3MA5U@electrue.co.uk>, Richard Evans
<Richard@electrue.co.uk> writes
>Does anyone know what the limit is for max length of CAT 5 cable between
>a workstation and a hub.

100m, including trunk wiring, and patch wiring at either end if
appropriate.

>I have to extend our network over a distance of
>about 600 metres too multiple workstations.

I have just installed a couple of Edimax TF3202TF 2*port 10/100Mbps Fast
Ethernet switches. They have a 10/100BaseTX port and a 100BaseFX port
(ST connectors). They support Full wire speed cut through, fragment free
cut through and store and forward switching. In full duplex mode, they
support Fibres up to 2km.

They cost 140quid +VAT each, and 4 fibre pre-terminated (ST) fibre
bundles can be bought for about 25 quid plus 1.6quid/m. Halve this price
if you want to dispense with the redundancy of 2 spare fibres, and you
will probably get discount on this sort of price if you are going for a
600m run.

Going for fibre has the distinct advantage that when you upgrade the
rest of your network to 100Mbps, you wont be stuck with only a 10Mbps
link between your distant offices.

>I am presuming that this
>would need some form of booster. Also I believe that there is limit to
>the number of hubs that can be joined on an ethernet network and that
>this is fairly low, something like 5  24 port hubs, is this correct or
>am I talking rubbish.

Personally, if you have 5 24port hubs, I would recommend connecting them
by a 5 or 8 port switching hub, segmenting your network into 5 collision
domains, and vastly increasing network bandwidth. You can also put
servers on your hub switch. Use 10/100 switches and your servers will go
from having 10/20Mbps bandwidth to having 100/200Mbps.

My network has a top level 5 port 100baseTX switching hub. One of these
ports is connected to the Fibre, another couple to servers, and another
two to other hubs. The other end of the fibre is connected to another
hub. The hubs connect to a mixture of 100baseTX and 10baseT
workstations. All of this only cost about 750quid plus VAT (excluding
fibre).

It gives us an almost completely switched system (i.e. all workstations
have 20Mbps or 200Mbps full duplex bandwidth each) rather than our old
10base2 system, which had 10Mbps shared between all workstations and
servers.

So far I am very impressed with the system. Now if only I could get the
print servers to stop unnecessarily broadcasting to the network...


Take care,


Mark.........
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