Sometimes I get into discussions around “How much performance do I need in my network?” Well, like many things in life, it depends. However, there is one situation that can cloud the decision. As my father used to say, “There are no solutions; only tradeoffs!” In SOHO networks, it can often come down to money vs performance. Like Roger Penske famously said about building extreme race cars, “Speed costs money; how fast do you want to go?” So, what is the one situation that might call for unexpectedly high performance capabilities? What if today’s the day when you need to do a significant upgrade on your PC? What if it involves transferring extremely large files. Your normal four-year-old laptop, with your normal Wi-Fi setup, with a  normal download speed of, say, 30 megabits per second (Mbps) might be fine for reading and writing email, and even uploading posts to your WordPress site. BTW, 30 Mbps is about 3 megabytes per second (MBps). But what if you have to transfer 150 gigabytes (GB)? That is the situation I had to deal with recently. I was helping a friend to buy and prepare a new laptop because his old one was on its last legs. The next task in the process was to transfer 150 GB from the old PC to the new one. So, I ran some speed tests on my 500 Mbps fiber Internet and came up with these results.

But most modern laptops don’t come with built-in Ethernet adapters. So you need a USB-to-Ethernet dongle. But I only had one Ethernet dongle (my personal laptop is a Lenovo ThinkPad and it does have Ethernet built in, so no dongle needed.). So, looking at the numbers above, what would you do?

1. Order another dongle and put the transfer off until tomorrow, even while knowing that your friend was desperate to get back online to deal with some family business.
2. Plug the one-and-only dongle into the old PC and accept that the transfer would be limited by the speed of the Wi-Fi on the new PC.

I chose option B and the transfer went smoothly well into the wee hours of the morning. My friend picked up his new laptop the next morning and went home very happy. Meanwhile, I did order a second USB-to-Ethernet dongle in case this situation arises again (it will).

So, to generalize, if you look at your current PC and network situation, is it completely satisfactory for your everyday operations? Then ask yourself if you have any headroom or alternatives for unusual situations? For example, your Wi-Fi may be perfectly adequate for your everyday tasks, but do you have an Ethernet option that you could utilize if needed? Do you have the dongles and cables needed to access that if needed? Something to think about.