Hey everybody, first time posting here. I've been doing some reading to try and figure out how to re-network the house, as our current network is being brought to its knees under what's quickly becoming normal load.

Currently have - 1 Apple Airport Extreme, 1 D-Link 8-port gigabit switch, 1 Motorola DSL modem with router built in. Current setup has the switch's WAN port going into the modem's 1st LAN, and the airport WAN into the switch LAN. Then there are 4 PCs and 2 PS3s into the remaining ports on the switch. The airport handles 4 iPads, a couple iPhones, 2 computers, 2 AppleTVs, blah blah blah. Now - the issue: Two of the PCs get used for gaming at the same time online (PC1 & PC2 -> Switch -> Modem -> Internet), then we want to watch a movie at the same time (PC3 -> Switch -> Airport -> AppleTV). When PC1 & PC2 are gaming and using skype, it is impossible to watch an HD movie on the AppleTV. It seems like there needs to be two separate networks formed (A media network for stuff shared inside the house, and a computing/gaming network for the internet access). We still want all computers on both networks to see each other, we still want everything to have network access. The issue is that we need the local traffic (media) to not get caught in the congestion of the outbound gaming and vice chat traffic.

My reading seems to say we need two separate subnets, but what's the best way to do it? Everything I can seem to find is from 2005-2006 and says the subnetting is overkill, but thinking back to 6, 7 years ago, I don't think you could have even come close to creating the network traffic at home that all the devices today do.

Any help would be appreciated, I'm surprised there aren't more issues with this to read about online. Seems like an issue that is going to become more common as more devices wind up in people's homes.

Well it's a lot of internet enabled devices!! Can you mention what your internet connection is? and did you check the bandwidth utilization of it? It is unlikely that you are having a congestion at the LAN end if you are using a Gig switch and 802.11N on your Airport Extreme.

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Isuru Senadheera
MCSE, CCNP, CCSP, MCITP
www.isururakshitha.org

The internet is 15 down, 1 up. Get about 13 and .8 though realistically. I didn't really factor in the internet too much as a bottleneck. The only lag problem was with the movie that was streaming over LAN, not the gameplay to the internet. I'm not super fluent with the networking, but can the internet actually cause a bottleneck at the switch that would be the issue?

It normally wouldn't. Internal lag would be due to bad cabling, a device at full CPU load, lots of broadcasts, or other bottlenecks like hard disk I/O for the video stream.

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