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My broadband internet connection goes from a cable to a combo switch/router/wlan supplied by the phone company that has 4 outgoing ethernet ports. I have two of these connected directly to PCs and it works fine.

One of the ethernet cables is very long and runs down to the office PC.

I now want to setup a third machine located in the office.

The plan is to purchase a Cisco SD2008T, 8 Port Gigabit Ethernet Switch for the office, and two more short ethernet cables.

I will connect the two office machines to the new switch and then connect this switch with a long cable to the main router/switch.

My question is do I need a crossover ethernet cable to connect the two switches, or will the existing long straight ethernet cable work fine?

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2 Answers 2

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The long, straight cable will work fine. All modern switches have auto-MDI/X.

Automatic MDI/MDI-X cable detection adjusts for different cable types currently in use on your network. - Amazon.com page for SD2008T

You should never use crossover cables with Gigabit ports unless you know exactly what you're doing.

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You only need a Crossover Cable to connect two PCs directly without a switch in between. And most NICs don't even need that anymore. For you switch just use a standard LAN cable. Unless "very long" does not mean more than 100 metres you should be good there as well.

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