FragFest News Item

40 gig places at JuneLAN

With the purchase of our new Cisco Catalyst modular switch, we are now offering 40 ports at full 1gigabit ethernet speed. This means two full table blocks of 20 persons each, cables provided by us, power boards provided by us and all with 1gig connections.

Unlike other Sydney LANparties where you share a 1 gig uplink with ~20 other people (and infact, our previous gigabit offering). These ports are not oversubscribed. You will get full gigabit transfers to any other port on the network!, although obviously the 100mbps ports you will only get a 100mbps to.

FragFest actually understands the LAN portion of a LANparty, which is again reinforced by our new network infrastructure.

Why not gigabit the whole LAN? because interest in gigabit ports hasn't shown the need. Our focus is then on core network performance rather than high connection speeds with low throughput performance. This has be proven in the past with many people are reporting superior throughput on our 100mbps ports to other events with 1gig ports.

You will of course need a gigabit ethernet card in  your computer to take advantage of this extra speed. Additionally, throughput performance will also be heavily impacted by 32bit pci gigabit cards, which will never deliver 1gig speeds as they cant actually push that much data into your motherboard, hard disks which may not be able to read or write fast enough to keep up, crappy network card drivers may not be able to move data fast enough and many other minor factors.

If you are using gig, you should check your actual connection speed after plugging in. If you are getting anything other than 1000/full-duplex you should go and force the speed in your card settings.