Tokyo and tech through the eyes of a split pea

Gigabits away!

Most – if not all – new apartment buildings in Tokyo come with ethernet strung throughout each apartment, but it can be difficult to obtain information about how the setup is configured. The apartment I moved into last year had at least one ethernet tap in each room, all connected to what looked like 10/100M router hidden near the fuse-box by the apartment entrance. Not wanting to disrupt my Internet, I was hesitant to fiddle with it. Besides, I was relying on wifi for the past 6 months so it wouldn’t have made much difference to upgrade it.

About a month ago I got my hands on a new iMac, which meant surfing the web closer to the 100Mb fiber connection the apartment comes with. But this was throttling activity to the in-house NAS I’ve got setup for storing music and movies, so I made an impulse purchase yesterday at Akihabara and picked up a gigabit switch. As it turns out, what I thought was a router for each apartment is just a switching hub, so simply replacing it with the new gigabit switch now gives me gigabit all throughout the apartment. schweet!

For testing the network, I used the HELIOS LanTest. Now my bottleneck is the hard-drive on each end. RAM-disk NAS, anyone? :)