Fair point re 100Mb/s…
But if I was running a feed to another zone in a property, I would ensure optimum/max performance to that destination to allow future expansion possibilities and requirements….
Anyway, 30m is nothing on Ethernet – I could blow the Data packets that far…!
When I ran a cable to the living room where the hifi is, I ran a separate cable to the TV, using a twin socket wall plate. Whether having a dedicated cable for the hifi made a difference, I don’t know. But I suspect any difference would be positive, not negative.
Using only one cable would necessitate using an additional switch. Of coarse this would give (some) people the opportunity of buying a £500 switch along with a £1000 LPS enhancing sound quality beyond belief.
Dedicated is always good. If you can do it within cable run limits, then why not, there’s no downsides. It saves another Switch point as you say, both re hardware expense but also you have to consider your layers within the network topology……In a domestic situation, even if extensive, a handful of switches ‘daisy chained’ in the network poses no great issue……but when you dealing with multiple 48-port switches at various IDF (Intermediate Distribution Frames) all linking back to the MDF and Core Switch, you really have to keep an eye on things…!
Simple (and fewer) dedicated feeds also provide a simpler fault diagnosis environment to the non network savvy as well…!
My ‘fancy’ streamer switch is a Netgear GS105E (£25) (with low power mode enabled and port based QoS settings), my ‘fancy’ power supply is an iFi iPower2 (£70) and my ‘fancy’ streamer cable is Cat6 UTP (£5) with a couple of Würt Elektronic ferrites (£5 each).
Each of these makes a small but worthwhile incremental improvement for relatively little cost.
Unfortunately Naim (and most other manufacturers of consumer devices) don’t actually support modern WiFi. You get up to 802.11ac which is now over a decade old.
I run my whole network at 100Mb as there’s nothing on it that needs more, and my internet connection is less than that, so it seems pointless to run Gb. Should save a bit of power, and possibly reduces electrical noise a bit.
In our case, it’s interfaces between computers, the back-haul on the WiFi mesh, and particularly the backup from the PC to the NAS that make use of 1000BASE-T.
That’s apples and oranges. With Ethernet, it’s the speeds only that are relevant. If all you need is 100Mbps, a 10GE connection won’t make any difference.
WiFi 7 for example has fundamental improvements, above just greater speeds.
That’s what I said in the post you chose to reply to saying the same could be said for Ethernet. So perhaps read the chain of replies again, you’re now going full circle.
BTW, good advice from @NogBadTheBad , I forgot to say the same in my initial post…Always worth running an extra couple cables if you’re there pulling through – I typically work in multiples of four!
Allows for redundancy, aggregation and any future expansion requirements….
Be wary of running a cable from one building to another if they have separate earths - this may lead to very unfortunate consequences if either building suffers a lightning strike, not necessarily visible. The discharge will run through the cable to the electrically lower of the two earths. Quite a well known phenomenon with extended Ethernet networks in the past.
As a network installer, I will draw the line there…!
Mind you, my OCD does often give me the predicament re directionality and whether to have the printed metre markings/Cat spec going towards the next switch or away from….!
If your house suffers a direct lightning strike, the network grounding is the very least of your worries…! Nothing would survive direct, quite possibly including the house…!
ESD factors can somewhat be accommodated with a grounded network i.e at the cabinet and use of in-line surge protectors for any cables that run to/from outdoors (their drain ideally be connected to the same common earth)….No 100% guarantee for anything large and fairly hard to avoid having some small ground loops on a real world site….
TBH, for a few cameras or AP’s, I rarely go to the trouble that a fully screened and grounded network entails – depends on the install aspects at hand.