[Asterisk-Users] Is Gigabit Ethernet necessary?

[Adam Goryachev]

On Sun, 2004-12-05 at 11:57, rsenykoff at harrislogic.com wrote:
> <snip>
> 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.

Wrong, well, at least it sounds wrong to me. When you look at three
concurrent calls between phones and the asterisk server, each phone will
have 100MB available between the phone and asterisk (using gigabit).
When using 100MB to the server, each phone only has 33MB available. So,
with 20 phones, each phone gets 5Mbps to the server, which, bandwidth
wise is still plenty, but latency wise, might start to have an
impact....

While, with gigabit, 20 phones can all still have 50Mbps direct to the
server.... 

> 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.
> </snip>

Well, it probably won't make a huge difference, but I'd probably
recommend it, even if just because I don't want the customer to be upset
in the future when (if) it does cause a problem.... ie, overprovision
wherever possible...

> Sounds good to me. The server will be dedicated to Asterisk, so no
> worries about other applications (unless I move the config to a
> database which down the line could be very likely).

Even then, your bandwidth between the DB and asterisk will likely be
quite small...

Regards,
Adam