What's the point of a gigabit ethernet connection?

I presume you meant Mbps, not Gbps. If that is all you are getting, it probably won't make a major difference to go with 10/100 Ethernet. Gigabit is just a bigger pipe. But the final bandwidth will be up to your service provider.

The 1 gigabit are mainly used for computers that are networked together to get the fastest speed like transferring files to another computer via ethernet. Main computer for rendering 2nd computer for production and the list goes on for fast productivity. But for internet speeds like that we wont see that in america for a very long time unless you move to china or hong kong for gigabit internet. Speeds like that exist for business but not for the consumer market

Hi, CAT6 cabling is not necessary for home use. CAT5e is sufficient to sustain gigabit link speeds on runs that are less than 100 meters in length.

The biggest difference between 100BASE-TX and 1000BASE-T (100 megabits vs 1000 megabits) is that the tighter symbol spacing reduces transmission delay overhead by about a factor of 10. This results in much better performance out of a gigabit link even if the transmitted data would not saturate a 100 megabit link over a fixed time interval.

Gigabit ethernet only comes into play if you are transferring information/files between your devices at your home. If you're not doing that, it doesn't matter. It's rare to even find an ISP residential offering that is able to match the speeds of fast ethernet. I never have. The fastest I've seen is 50Mbps.

Now gigabit ethernet outside the home? It's a standard in most businesses. And then when you get into data centers, gigabit ethernet starts to become slow, outdated really. At my current job, we're phasing out gigabit ethernet and standardizing 10 gigabit to all of our servers and hosts. And we're even going so far as 40 gigabit. We just purchased a pair of Cisco Nexus 6004 switches to install as our distribution layer in our data center. The 6004 has 96 ports of 40 gigabit, but can be broken out into 384 ports of 10 gigabit. That's good bandwidth

But in your home, 1 gigabit is cool for traffic between your devices. Your internet connection wouldn't know the difference if your router was 10/100 or 10/100/1000. Your internet connection is the bottleneck, not your home network.

@ humangod
I have a question I've always been curious about. You seem well informed... maybe you can shed some light on it. Even though internet download speed may not be any greater with gigabit Ethernet due to ISP limitations, would the extra bandwidth that is usually associated with 10/100/1000 LAN still be more beneficial for homes that have multiple internet users compared to 10/100?

Edit: Nevermind. Answered my own question when I re-read my post.

Here's the technical answer: TCP throttles itself to match whatever bandwidth is available. For example, let's say you have 10mbps as your internet connection but you are connected to a 1gbps LAN (which then connects to a router that is connected to your 10mbps internet). Let's say you start downloading a file from a server out there on the internet using FTP. TCP will initiate it's 3 way handshake with the server and then the data will start to be transferred. The way TCP works is, it starts off with slow transmission rates and starts to incrementally increase the speed of the transfer. It'll do this until it starts to detect packet loss. TCP doesn't know that you're connected to a 1 gig LAN or that there is a bottleneck further in the network at your internet connection at 10mbps. It has no idea what speeds are available to it. That's why it will automatically increase the speeds until it detects packet loss, then it throttles the speed back down until the packet loss goes away. That's why even with poor cabling causing ethernet frame CRC errors and drops, and very unreliable connections, you can still use your connection to a point because TCP overcomes these shortcomings and hardships. UDP is a different story...

All devices on your network sharing that connection are doing this (as long as TCP is being used. UDP is different). One device will use the entire 10Mbps of the internet connection, so long as the server on the other end transfer back at the same speed. When a new device begins to use the internet, TCP will start to sense packet loss because some of the data it's sending through the network is getting dropped by the ISP equipment (modem or whatever is on the other end), because the new device is getting some data in.

But all devices cannot use more than that 10mbps internet connection because the ISP equipment drops anything above 10Mbps. So if your LAN is a gigabit LAN and all of your devices in your home are using the connection to the max, you're still only using 10% of your home's network throughput.

So the easy answer: if you're not transferring data between your home devices, you don't need anymore LAN bandwidth available above what your WAN/internet connection is because it goes unused.

There are a lot more variables when you start talking about enterprise-class equipment, but for consumer-level, the above is all you need to worry about.

Many large companies, especially service providers, have been allocated IP blocks from ARIN. Once allocated a block from ARIN, the holder is responsible for forming arrangements (called peering agreements) with other network owners to enable logical communication between them. They act as their own ISP, and may subdivide and allocate their own IP blocks to their own customers.

Businesses and data centers are able to install much more bandwidth for a very large number of reasons. Many data centers are located in major cities near popular network exchange points (called peering exchanges) which means that the distance between the source and destination of the network's link traffic is typically quite low. The burst of the Dot Com Bubble also left a lot of unused optical fiber underground that can be purchased for quite cheap. As a result, the build-out cost of connections between major data centers, major population centers, or between major peering exchanges is quite low. The bulk of the cost for residential ISPs is in getting that traffic to customers which are spread out all over the place.

It is purely cost. You can get 10g fiber internet say for about $8000/month but that assumes you have some method of getting connected to a fiber that connects to a major ISP. This tends to be a key issue when business are looking for buildings to buy/lease for their office/data centers. You technically can get fiber run to your house if you are willing to pay for the cost to dig everything up and pay all the fees to the city etc. After that the monthly fee is not all that high...well for someone that can afford $8k/month.

Its all about where you live. If you are lucky enough to live in the parts of a city that google has run their new 1g fiber network in you can get 1g internet for extremely cheap. They even have a free plan that gives you 5m/sec after you pay a 1 time fee of $300

It's all about cost. You're able to get these speeds as well, but you'd have to be able to pay for them. At my current job, we pay around 8 million dollars per year for our connectivity. That not only includes our internet, but all of our WAN links to connect up all of our sites (20 main sites in addition to over 225 small clinic sites). But we pay for business-class circuits, where there is no bull$h1t "up-to clause" for your speeds. For example, all of our main hospital sites have dual gig WAN links and we better get gig out of them if our traffic bursts that high. If not, we have a problem with our carrier and we let them know and they better fix it.

In regards to who hosts business internet connections, ISP's still do that. But at a much higher level. Sure some businesses still have needs for DSL and other lower level connections, but large corporations and organizations pay for higher level circuits. These include older technology such as T1's, DS3's, and newer technologies such as ethernet (ethernet isn't new, it's just relatively new to bring ethernet directly to a customer prem). In my last job, we only used T1's and DS3's. The job before that I worked at an ISP and we gave a customer anything they wanted to buy, up to 10 gig ethernet. At my current position, we have everything from T1's to 10 gig metro-ethernet circuits. But most of our higher-bandwidth and more costly circuits are for WAN connections between our sites, and not used for internet. Circuit/connections selection is really determined by which carrier(s) are in your area and what they are able to supply. Just as we have a wide variety of circuits type at our sites, we also have a wide variety of carriers because not all carriers can provide access to all geographic areas.