[Discuss] Future-proofing a house for networking -- what to run?

[rlk at alum.mit.edu (Robert Krawitz)]

On Wed, 13 Sep 2017 14:36:51 -0400, Richard Pieri wrote:
> On 9/13/2017 11:44 AM, Robert Krawitz wrote:
>> On Wed, 13 Sep 2017 11:38:36 -0400, Richard Pieri wrote:
>>> 1080p video streams (MPEG-4) need about 5-8 Mbps burst bandwidth.
>>> Gigabit Ethernet has practical throughput about 300Mbps.
>> 
>> ???  I routinely get over 100 MB/sec (>800 Mbps) transferring files --
>> even with scp -- between systems with fast enough disks.
>
> If I'm not mistaken that's with jumbo frames enabled. Consumer NICs
> typically do not support jumbo frames. Regardless, if you're getting
> ~2.5 times my throughput estimate then your MythTV usage is consuming
> about 2% of your available bandwidth instead of my 5% estimate, so
> instead of wasting 95% of the network bandwidth by not using it you're
> wasting 98% of it.

This is a laptop (Dell Precision M6500) talking to the on-board NIC on
a consumer-grade motherboard.  According to ifconfig, it's using an
MTU of 1500 bytes.

This is not using MythTV; it's simply using scp or rsync to copy files
around.  Obviously I'm not doing that continuously, but when I'm
moving a lot of data (20-30 GB isn't uncommon), I want it to be fast.
WiFi is simply not efficient for that.

> If you were doing video editing then that would be a different story.
> This is large(ish) scale bulk data transfers where high sustained
> throughput is necessary. But then, you would do this kind of wiring in a
> studio environment, not the entire residence.
>
> So, yeah, whole-home wiring just doesn't make sense.
-- 
Robert Krawitz                                     <rlk at alum.mit.edu>

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