Ethernet splitter gigabit to computer 100mbit to phone

I have googled and amazoned and I can't find a solution or product for this. Free Republic always comes through for me in answering these type of questions, so here it is. Using an existing Cat5e cable in the wall to each desktop, is there a splitter or inexpensive device that will provide 1-gigabit to the computer and then 100mbit to a VOIP phone off of that single Cat5e in the wall? The original plan was for the phone to provide the VOIP and data to the desktop computer, as the phone has two RJ45 ports on it. And oh, the phone needs to be supplied POE by the Cat5e feed coming into it from the network switch. Therefore, with this said, is there such a splitter or inexpensive device to do this? In other words, I need the 1gibabit speed to the desktop computer and 100mbit to the VOIP phone, but somehow, it would have to utilize that single Cat5e run that is in the wall.

Size your network to the incoming speed, unless you have massive traffic on internal networks. Do you have fiber into your business?

Unless you are in a medical, space, or physics field, it's unlikely that you need anything more than 100 MBit.

And why isn't your IT department handling this?

/johnny

We have been assuming you only have one RJ45 port at each station.

We did a network upgrade with a phone system a few months ago. We found it cheaper to through an inexpensive switch in at a number of stations that adding additional ports and cabling. Adding an inexpensive switch would solve your problem of the 1gigabit through 100megbit limitation.

You are SOL.

You'll be auto-sensing to 100mb and the computer will have to plug into the phone.

That said, you really don't need more than 100mb to the desktop. Lot's of studies have been done on this. Absent an EXTRAORDINARILY POWERFUL desktop doing extraordinarily unusual things, you'll likely never notice the difference.

A dedicated 100meg pipe is a BUNCH of bandwidth.

I’m inclined to agree that most people don’t need gigabit at their desktop, unless you’re moving multi-GB files around every day. The 100mb would be easy since your phones already have an internal 100mb switch.

Also, note that only two of the responses actually took into account the POE requirement you mentioned!

But if you really have to have Gb, then the Cisco POE switch mentioned above would do the trick. Then again, if you’re going to spend $150/computer to do this, you could probably have a second cable pulled, and the the phone and computer would each have their own connection.

You need a PoE Switch. PoE means the ethernet line has power on it. Most switches dont do that because computers don’t need it. Most phones, however, get their power from their signal line so they need it. This is something more than just a gigabit 10/100/1000 ethernet switch so don’t just go buy one from walmart. But that is also less than a managed ethernet switch so don’t go waste your money on one of those. Go to amazon, put in ‘poe switch’ and look for one that has gigabit (or it might say 10/100/1000). ALternately you could get any old cheap gigabit switch and also get a device which inject power into the ethernet line. That is probably the cheaper route. If you search amazon for PoE switch some devices like that will be in the list.

Should read

We found it cheaper to throw in an inexpensive switch in at a number of stations than adding additional ports and cabling.

sorry

Most VOIP phones have a built-in switch, but it is often 100Base-T. This is not a problem for most people in a home network, as they are not often transferring huge files over the network to other computers at home.

If you really need to have Gigabit to your computer, buy a $30 Gigabit switch and plug both the computer and phone into it, and plug a patch cable from the wall into it.

“yes, it is worth the expense and effort to get everyone to 1 gigabit speed on their comptuers”

This is most likely not an accurate statement, i.e. there is almost certainly no requirement for 1 Gbps on their computers. People do not take kindly to being over-sold solutions which provide no improvement in service -this is your risk here.

Seriously, any company conducting reputable computing operations at 1 Gbps will not have a network technician who does not know what a switch is. I will therefore assume your company does not have OC3 connectivity or clients requiring throughput above 100 Mbps. Ergo don’t waste time and money on end user equipment for which there is no provider equipment or end user requirement.

As others have stated an inexpensive switch and VoIP power supplies will work. If you don’t want to buy the VoIP PSs then you’re shelling out a grand or more for a POE switch.

If you’ve already got enterprise-class switching infrastructure you likely already have POE, QOS and 1 Gb speed to each network drop. If that is all true, simply specify handsets that will pass 1 Gb to the desktop. VOIP phones have two ethernet connectors - one for link to the network (the “goes-inta”) and the other for connection to the local workstation (the “goes-outa”). Gig phones will pass 1 Gb to the workstation. They’re more expensive but if you want Gb speed, don’t let the phone implementation create bottlenecks at each desktop. A number of suggestions advocating the use of a small, 4 port gig switch at the desktop are cost effective. Not certain but that may have an impact on the ability of QOS since the 4 port switch appears as a single collision-domain to the infrastructure port. Your throughput would likely suffer but, more importantly, the QOS function might be foiled. QOS can prioritize voice over data and POE will power the handset. Something to consider if this scenario is true - if you have to have dial tone during a power outage, you’ll have to equip your switch racks with UPS backups.
Choice of VOIP vendor is not dependent upon the switch infrastructure. I’ve seen plenty of mixed environments that work flawlessly with, say, Cisco VOIP and Avaya/Nortel infrastructure. Good luck....

Experts, feel free to educate me ...

At the risk of asking a really stupid question - what is your Cat 5 connecting to? Do you have a direct fiber optic line to your carrier that can carry 1 gig? I'm not expert, but if your company connects through other than a dedicated line, I don't see how you could even send 1 gig on your outbound line - and I assume you are connecting more than one computer, so a 1 gig connection to an individual computer strikes me as useless.

IMHO you are right on. The only reason I put in a gigabit switch and Cat 6 cable was to get a really speedy connection between two PCs and a NAS that are passing lots of data. I cannot ever get above 100Mb from my router and the ISP cable connection is limited to 20Mb (as I usually do I have probably mixed Mb and mb here)

As you mentioned about the QOS/switch issue and collisions, I was aware of this being a possible issue. The cable runs were substantially greater than $150 per station in our case (physical firewall issues in an old building). We tested it out for a week with no issues and determined a couple of switches cost effectively solved the problem.

With the exception of a couple of users, most data requests to the server were ridiculously below 100mb.

Like many, I have wondered what John1111 is running to the site. Fiber? And what is that they need 1gb at each station.

The decision of 100Mb vs. 1 Gb is strictly budgetary in my opinion. Concurring with most of the posts here, the bandwidth is excessive by today’s standards so the decision is not necessarily one of a technical nature. However, if implementing new switch infrastrcuture AND considering a VOIP solution for the PBX requirements, I’d go to Gig now and assure a solid infrastructure for many moons to come. The last thing the finance guys are going to want hear in 5 years is the need for another infrastructure project to upgrade to Gig (the industry will eventually find a way to suck up the bandwidth that we today call excessive).

I do think the implementation of a station-side switch for this application would throw wrench into the works. At a minimum, POE will not pass through the station switch to my knowledge - so now you have to add a power supply to the phones OR add a POE injector behind the station switch. Additionally, and I’ve got a call out to my VOIP geek colleagues to confirm, the QOS function on the infratructure side will be compromised since you’ve now got two MAC addresses in the same collision domain - I could be wrong and will verify as time permits. If I’m not mistaken, it is the QOS function that seperates the MAC of the phone to a VLAN on which resides the voice-mail device, switch/router acquired for the VOIP equivalent of a PBX and phone administration machine(s).
Finally, and this is just anecdotal, seems like every time I drop a small 4 port switch on or under someone’s desk, some knucklehead will loop and ethernet cable and start a broadcast storm. Just one more part to troubleshoot (we’ve actually started filling empty switch ports with unterminated RJ-45 connectors - they’re removable for expansion unlike my proposal to fill them with epoxy).

If I hear back from one of the VOIP gurus with an answer on the QOS items I’ll put up another post.

In my opinion, the external connection to the internet is less important than fat pipes inside the premises. I’m not concerned that users can get to Facebook quickly. I am concerned that users can get to spindles in the server room quickly. If you start adding video for any reason (staff development, conference calling, etc.) in any sort of multi-cast or potential multi-cast situation, the bandwidth will get sucked up at some point down the road.
Most Gb gear today has the added dimension of creating an even faster backbone when necessary. Almost all the Avaya gear can accept a 10 Gb GBIC to provide huge pipes when needed. Also, if you’ve got any WAN needs on fiber, you can easily upgrade to 10Gb and start spreading your off-site backups and DR applications to another corner of the campus. I’m envisioning a complete data center running VM’s of all essential services at the “off-site”. When the off-site is in production, I don’t wawnt bandwidth limitations impacting my efforts or user productivity. As I said in another post - it is a financial decision. If you can rationalize it all, it is worth the trouble now to avoid another upgrade in 5 years. The industry will catch up to overly sized pipes that you implement today.

I had most of your concerns going into upgrade and just haven't seen any problems. Our biggest issue was upload bandwidth since the client's only alternative was limited capacity DSL (that had line noise and distance issues from the CO).

I totally agree if building a new network to do 1gb capacity since the added cost at that point is not appreciable vs putting in old technology.

The biggest challenge is most of the businesses we handle are still under significant budget constraints, even a small incremental dollar amounts can stop solutions from moving forward and yet a solution has to be found. It is usually, "Can you find a cheaper alternative? We just can't afford that right now."

I find it incredibly rewarding to work with some of the business owners we work with. Most of these guys have had to put dollars into their businesses to make payroll at different and sometimes extended periods over the last few years. One guy put in $300k over six months to keep his employees going--knowing he was going to downsize his employees by 85% at the end of that period (Chinese outsourcing and two major clients postponed and reduced orders).

We should be doing a full conversion in the next few weeks. (Nice to have a job where the decision makers want it done right and have a budget.) I will spend 15 minutes with our Shoretel guy and ask him about his thoughts.

Do appreciate your thoughts.

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