Jason Lavoie wrote on Sat, 28 July 2007 18:11 |
... or does a bundle take up the same amount of network traffic even if it's not full?
Jason
|
for the most part, a bundle takes the same bandwidth regardless of its content. a bundle with one channel of audio still contains seven channels of silence, repesented by a boatload of digital zeroes.
as for maximum bundles to transmit, i have successfully set up a system with nine broadcast (multicast) bundles for a total of 72 channels of audio (actually we had two parallel systems for 144!). everything was moving in one direction, and we had three sets of units to receive in three different locations. this seems to be about the limit for multicast, as the bandwidth of our 100mbit switch was pretty much at its limit. gigabit switches DO NOT help, as the 100 mbit ports on the cobranet units will still get clogged with multicast traffic.
as for cat5 length, 100m *IS* the number, and existed long before cobranet. longer runs require a repeater, switch, or media converter/fiber extension. the above system was originally on <100m cat5 and worked very reliably. we set up this same system again, with 100mbit fiber links between the sending and receiving units about 3000ft apart. we found we lost enough bandwidth through the media converters to limit us to eight broadcast bundles. still a lot of signals.
as noted before, you should really limit the use of multicast bundles when possible. the switch is required to pass these packets to all rx units, even if they wont be needing them. a unicast bundle will only be passed to the unit that needs it, so you can have many more bundles than 9 if you plan it out right.