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4 Responses to “What does having two gigabit ethernet ports do?”

1. Big Dave says:

   January 17, 2009 at 1:24 am

   Mostly this is in servers and gaming machines. It allows a couple of things:-

   1 you can set them up as a “bridge” which will allow a single IP address but gives you 2Gb of throughput (twice the speed)

   or

   2 you can allocate each card a different IP address and setup your server software processes to listen on specific interfaces
2. Nighthawk says:

   January 20, 2009 at 12:39 pm

   They’re no good to you if you’re a home user.

   Gigabit ethernet (running at 1 Gbps) is used in corporate infrastructure usually on servers, high-speed distrubution switches or on routers to provide access to a large number or client computers or for creating distribution level network backbones.

   Fast ethernet (running at 100 Mbps) provides access to clients when it comes to corporate networks. Same goes for home use. I haven’t noticed any routers with gigabit ethernet ports etc.

   Having two ports wouldn’t do any good either since you’re only gonna be using one.
3. a_fenix says:

   January 23, 2009 at 6:15 am

   It doesn’t. After all, you only use ONE port to connect to a network or to the Internet (unless you are connected physically to 2 different networks) And ethernet speeds are measured in multiples of 10. :10,100,1000 …..
4. John G says:

   January 23, 2009 at 7:55 pm

   With 2 ports, you can use a technique called “link aggregation” or “bonding” which makes the 2 ports look just like 1 regular port to the applications you are running. There are pros and cons to this:

   Pro:
   1. Better fault tolerance – this was the original intent of the technology
   2. Allows load balancing between 2 networks (E.g. cable + DSL)
   3. Better theoretical speed (though you will be limited by the slowest part of your connection path).

   Cons:
   1. Puts your network adapter in “promiscuous mode”, which means it will have to look at all packets sent on the network, not just packets sent to it – this means more load on the CPU
   2. Your speed is still limited by the slower part of your connection path. For instance, if your internet service provide is only giving you 40Mb/second, you can’t connect to the internet any faster than that by using 2 ports.

   If you have 2 computers in the same room, each with 2 gigabit ports, and you connect them all up via a gigabit router, then you should be able to get nearly twice the transfer speed compared to using only 1 gigabit port. In this case, your connection speed to the internet is not a limiting factor.

   You did not say what operating system you are running. The instructions will be different for different operating systems.

   In most newer versions of Windows, for instance, just use ethernet cables to connect both ports to your router, then go to the control panel and right click on the network adapter and choose “bond”.

   See the links below for more info.