It depends on how you use it. 15 years ago I wired my first house for ethernet. I ran Cat 5e, but my hubs and NICs were all 10mb. It was overkill.
Then, 8 years ago, I bought a different house. Again I wired it with Cat 5e, but all my NICs and ethernet switches were 100mb. It is even more overkill.
Right now, I have a network of 10 computers running in my house and garage including my servers, and for me, 10mb would still be more than I could use.
I'd classify you as a very light network user, then. 10 megabit is pretty slim considering a good number of Internet feeds are faster thin this (mine is 12.) a typical wireless connection is faster, too (up to 56megabits.)
For copying small files, printing, email, and light surfing (music, low-bandwidth video, etc...) 10 megabit will get by for a small number of network users, but beyond that the network becomes a significant bottleneck.
Once you start dealing with large files, particularly uncompressed DV video files (which runs 82GB per hour,) a 10 megabit network is going to hopelessly slow, and a 100msgabit network will be painfully slow. Say you shoot 5 minutes of video at your daughter's birthday party. If you want to move that video file across a network it'll take:
- 10Mb/s - 1 Hour 11 Minutes 34.97 Seconds (from here.)
- 100Mb/s - 7 Minutes 9.5 Seconds
- 1Gb/s - 42.95 Seconds
More typical is that you're watching a movie streaming from a storage device on the network or over the Internet. Little Susie upstairs is doing the same, and Johnny is playing Halo with his buddy across town. That's a lot of data being streamed. A 10 megabit network just won't handle that kind of traffic effectively.
For people who want to feed video through their network, I recommend going as much as you can afford
And there's days, the cost of gigabit equipment is MUCH closer to that of 10/100 gear.
I can get
gigabit network cards for less than $15 each. I can get a
5-port gigabit switch for under $25.
If you are using your ethernet as a computer network, 100mb is perfectly adequate and will be for a long time yet.
Sorry -- 100MB might be on paper, but in practice its getting close to its end of life. In a few years Gigabit will be considered standard for even home network backbones.
The problem isn't raw throughput, it's latency. Real-time applications (applications where the TIMING of the packets is as important as their contents,) need lots of excess bandwidth to keep the packets arriving on time. If a big burst of data hits the network just before a frame of video does, that frame of video has to wait for the data in front of hit to make its way through the network. If it doesn't make it to the TV (or whatever,) in time, you see a glitch. If that was a key frame, then you get a horribly trashed image that takes several seconds to fix itself.
QoS (Quality of Service) extensions make this more manageable, but its not a perfect solution. You still need a lot of bandwidth.
