"10mb/second half duplex" what does this mean?

[rs1985]

as topic
thanks for answering my question in advance

[txusa03]

something to do with your network card capability. Go on to google and type that into the search area and you should get some more info. hope that helps.

[06graphite]

it means that your network card is operating at 10mb per second in half duplex mode.

Half duplex means that it can only send or receive in any given slice of time. Full duplex would mean that it can send and receive simultaneously. If you want more check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_duplex

[rs1985]

but also is it old technology and being really slow?

[txusa03]

Originally Posted by rs1985

but also is it old technology and being really slow?

hard to tell, network involved other things too (like the network controller and the signal type it uses). Here is a link that might give you more insight. Normally you would want to be using a full duplex if your network controller supports it.

http://h71000.www7.hp.com/wizard/wiz_4658.html

[JamieA]

Originally Posted by rs1985

but also is it old technology and being really slow?

06graphite has it nailed.

As for slow/old technology. Generally half duplex is old technology. Think of old speaker phones where you could only talk or listen, but not both. Conversations were stilted, difficult sometimes and took longer than just picking up the phone and talking naturally.

However, if you were just listening to what someone had to say, or listening to a teleconference it was great, unless you made a noise in the room significant enough to cut off the conversation and missed an important bit.

Now think of this same principal in network communication (those phones are actually called Half Duplex speakerphones, as opposed to the mordern Full Duplex type), which is just a conversation between one or more computers. Whether or not it works well for your situation depends on your ratio of sending information to receiving information. If you mostly send or receive you will not notice much speed degredation, but as this creeps towards 50:50 split you will notice you get more like just a bit less than 5Mb throughput from the link.

Half duplex is cheap, and saves bandwidth, so if this is a link over a communications interface, it could work out, but if this is a network card for a Local Area Network, ditch it and get a proper one. 10Mb LAN cards were in vogue when Vanilla Ice was popular. Today LAN cards are at least 100Mb and mostly 1000MB (1Gb).

The thing with network speeds is that they are a little confusing, the Mb actually stands for Mega Bits. To convert it to Megabytes, you have to divide by 8, so a 10Mb connection will allow you to transmit roughly 1.25 megabytes per second. This is the raw speed, there are losses due to how information is packaged when it is transmitted over a network, rule of thumb is a 20% overhead, so your 10Mb connection will do 1Megabyte per second max throughput.

So your device will do a throughput of 1Megabyte per second ONE WAY at a time. Like I said if your network traffic is back and forth (like many networks are) your actual throughput will hover around the 6 to 700 kilobytes per second mark or less given typical network traffic patterns I tend to see on my machines.