[Asterisk-Users] Is Gigabit Ethernet necessary?

[Kevin P. Fleming]

rsenykoff at harrislogic.com wrote:
> For an office that is using VoIP phones to connect to Asterisk, is gigabit 
> ethernet really necessary for the Asterisk box to connect to the switch? I 
> know that I won't even approach the limits of 100 Mbps, but would gigabit 
> help with latency / collisions when several calls are underway? The fact 
> is, anything going outside the office will be over a data T1, so intuition 
> tells me that 100 Mbps should be fine...  The office will have 20 phones, 
> with remote VoIP phones added to the mix later on.

If you are using a switch, collisions a pretty much a non-issue, unless 
you have enough traffic to saturate a port to the server. Latency is 
also not helped any significant amount, since you still have a 100Mbit 
link in the path between the phone and Asterisk.

In other words, for that application, it likely will not make any 
difference at all. If it's cheap to do, and the server will also be 
doing any file serving duties, then it would be a nice insurance policy 
against a single user swamping the server's port.