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Do I need a Gigabit port capable wireless router with a 24Mbps down and 7Mbps upload speed cable modem? Does anyone know how to calculate this? FYI, I wont be using the wireless connection from my main computer system. My computer will connect via a hard wire into the router (of the wireless variety), which in turn is connected to the cable modem.

My research suggests that the 100 Mbps port can easily handle it. Is that true?

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  • It should be fine, but it depends on the number of users on the network, distance to wireless router, speed that your machine can send and receive data off disk, etc. I find that with two users, faster is preferred, for obvious reasons. Let your cable modem be the bottleneck.
    – user3463
    Jun 11, 2010 at 22:30
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    I think you mean Mbps (Megabits per second), not MB/s (Megabytes per second)
    – Pretzel
    Jun 11, 2010 at 23:51
  • Nope. I mean Mbps, as measured by speedtest.net .
    – djangofan
    Jun 17, 2011 at 23:41

2 Answers 2

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100 megabits per second can easily handle a 24 megabits per second down stream. The biggest reason to go gigabit is for communicating on your local network. If you want to transfer a movie from one computer to another, gigabit should be 10 times faster (network overhead and packet loss means it's not actually 10x, but close).

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  • Ok, so it sounds like I need a gigabit wireless router only if I want computers internally to my network to be able to transfer between each other via hard wire link into the nic ports on the device.
    – djangofan
    Jun 15, 2010 at 18:57
  • Pretty much. Otherwise 100mbps should be perfectly adequate.
    – Jack M.
    Jun 16, 2010 at 17:22
  • So, I bought a Netgear 3700N router and it easily handles my internet connection with absolutely no performance degradation at all. Its as if I had a hard wired connection. Im using Wireless-N protocol (I assume) at 2.4Ghz frequency on it (channel 5) from 20-ft away through 2 plaster walls. Awesome. My question is answered.
    – djangofan
    Jun 25, 2010 at 19:15
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If you mean Mbps (megabits per second) and not MB/s (megabytes per second), as poited out by Randolph Potter, then yes.

If you want gigabit speeds in your LAN (local area network) then you need to make sure that all of your network components supports it (not the modem, as it has nothing to do with your LAN), note that you need a cat6 cable to handle the load and the switch integrated in the router + your computers network card should also support gigabit speeds.

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  • cat5e is sufficient for gigabit. cat6 is not required. Jul 1, 2010 at 11:49

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