[Asterisk-Users] Is Gigabit Ethernet necessary?

[Kristian Kielhofner]

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.
> 
> TIA,
> -Ron
> 

Ron,

For what it costs, it is usually worth it to put a gig card in your
server (a good one).  Gigabit cards have newer and much better buffering
and pci bus support.  They are also much better at offloading processing
from the system's CPU.  You need to make sure that you have a good one.
  Because a crappy Gigabit card is probably not much better than a
crappy 100mb card...

I like Intel nics (both 100mb and 1000mb).  Something supported by
e1000 shouldn't be too expensive and usually will work pretty well with
most all OS's.

my $0.02

--
Kristian Kielhofner