LAN speed / Internet speed - a clarification

My office LAN speed is 100mbps, and I considering to up that to 1000Mbps tio increase the speed at which shared files on our network (eg, Word documents etc) are opened.

Is this LAN speed totally independent of the speed of our internet connection?

Currently our internet connection speed is 2M/512k. If I increasse this to 8M /1Mbit/s will this only affect the actual internet browsing/download of email speeds etc, but have nothing to to with the speed of the LAN?

I have one user using Windows Remote to dial into their PC in the office - would increasing wither LAN speed or internet speed, or both, make things faster for them on their end?

 

Yes. Your internet connection is like a pipe between two networks. The Internet and your LAN. The only traffic that is affected by the speed of the internet connection pipe, is the traffic that moves up that pipe. Your router will prevent normal LAN traffic entering that pipe. The router's job is to keep the two separate.

Absolutely. Increasing the internet connection speed will have a negligible effect on traffic speed between two computers on your LAN.

LAN speed is so much faster than your internet connection, that increase of the LAN speed will have a minimal effect on the remote user. They might see a slight improvement as the network will be able to handle simultaneous transfer across the network that much quicker.

The bottle neck for the remote user is the internet connection. Also the real bottle neck is the upload speed on the internet connection as that controls the speed of traffic from your LAN to the remote user. If you upgrade your internet connection to improve remote connection performance, make sure both the upload and download speeds are increased. If you just increase the download speed, your remote user will see very little benefit. Your increase from 512k to 1M upload speed will only double the speed of the connection. So better, but not a huge increase network-wise.

Also if your remote user is using an Asynchronous connection (e.g. ADSL), the other bottle neck will be their upload speed as this will throttle the connect from they PC to the LAN. Therefore, it would also be worth looking at upgrading their connection.

 

Thanks Reggie,
Thats really made it all clear in my mind now.