I have an Airport Extreme (with Gigabit Ethernet) connected up to my cable modem, my Mac, and my PC. I have one spare port on the AE and thought about hooking up a spare 10/100 Ethernet Switch I have (D-Link DES-1105). I could hook up the Blu-ray player, etc, to this.
Will hooking up a switch like this (and 10/100 Ethernet devices to that switch) drop the Gigabit Ethernet on the rest of the AE to 10/100? Or, will the AE keep the Gigabit devices running at full speed, and keep the 10/100 Switch running at 10 or 100 Mb/s?
Best Answer
Auto-negotiating switches, like the one in the AE, will run each port at the speed of it's connection. I think you have to go back to the days of hubs to run into the "port drag-down" issue with one slow device bringing everything connected to the lowest connection speed.