How can a single ethernet cable running to a gigabit switch provide multiple connections with gigabit speeds?

Question

How can a single ethernet cable running to a gigabit switch provide multiple connections with gigabit speeds?

In: 179

Answer 1

Switches typically have higher speed uplink ports, so that you might have 24 or 48 downstream ports capable of operating at 1G each, then you have a pair of higher speed uplinks ports, which might be 10, 25, or 40G uplinks.

Outside of a certain datacenter environments, it’s very unusual for clients to consistently maintain high utilization levels. So 2 10G uplinks (20G total) are almost certainly going to be able to handle the traffic of 48 1G connections.

If not, you chose your hardware wrong and likely should be using high throughput fiber switches that link to the servers via fiber, and use bundled 40G / 100G uplinks.

Source: Me. Network engineer currently slacking off at work.