Should I use the SFP port on my switches?

[Liver]

Basically I have 2 houses despite being covered by one roof. I have 2 switches, one in each house. Traveling the route of the wire, 100 feet or less separate the switches.

The network wire is mix of cat 6 and cat 6E. Currently I have the switches connected via LAN ports on both the switches. Both are gigabit switches, both have SFP connections. One older Cisco (freaking work horse) and a newer Ubiquiti 24 port POE. I have many unused ports.

We have one server and three TVs that feed off that server. The server is sending 4K content.

Will I gain anything by connecting the switches to each other via the SFP port?

I absolutely will not be using fiber optic cable.

 

[SamirD]

Gigabit is gigabit--especially if you plan to put an rj45 sfp and then just use the same copper cable. Not to mention most switches share the sfp with another rj45 port, so you'll not even gain a free port.

Are you having issues that require you to have more bandwidth between the two? If so, you may be able to set up a LAG if you're got more than one cable run between the two switches.

 

[Liver]

I will be using the same copper cable.

The SFP ports are not shared on the switches I have.

Literally the only thing that remotely uses bandwidth at my house is streaming 4K movies from the server to whatever 4K Apple TV (latest).

I do have 4 cables running from one server location to the other server location.

I haven’t seen any slow down, just curious if I would see any improvement.

Edit. I’m thinking it’s not required for me. I guess I’m more curious.

 

[robijito123]

Ubiquiti might have 10g on the sfp if it has +, but if your cisco doesnt have 10gb then no gains.... so if you have a ton of traffic and say server that can actually push out fast enough you go from 1gbit 1byte/8bit or about 250mb/s , more like 225 in reality to a factor of 10 to 2.25gb/s but you have to have a monster spinner array are some fancy ssds and you know like the need for it on the other side

 

[Vengance_01]

Others have echoed unless you 10GB on both side linking back to a core switch that's 10GB or Router there is no point. Now if you really think your 1GB links are saturated look at port aggregation so you can bond 2 1GB ports together

 

[SamirD]

I will be using the same copper cable.

The SFP ports are not shared on the switches I have.

Literally the only thing that remotely uses bandwidth at my house is streaming 4K movies from the server to whatever 4K Apple TV (latest).

I do have 4 cables running from one server location to the other server location.

I haven’t seen any slow down, just curious if I would see any improvement.

Edit. I’m thinking it’s not required for me. I guess I’m more curious.

Nope, no improvement. I actually was curious myself when I first got some fibre and some sfps--zero difference as expected.

 

[Liver]

Thanks y’all. I’ll stay in the right sided lane.

Appreciate the advice.

 

[SamirD]

Thanks y’all. I’ll stay in the right sided lane.

Appreciate the advice.

LOL! No worries! Generally the sfps are used with optical cables to break the traditional 100m limits of copper.