Robbie wrote:

I think you've identified the issues correctly. Unfortunately, the
necessary conclusion is that the amount of contention will depend on
the usage pattern. My first inclination is that Option B will be
fine for a typical office (and is similar to what I have here). If
you're doing video or something else with large bandwidth requirements,
however (e.g. diskless clients), you may need to pull more cable.

The best advice I can give you is to try to estimate peak bandwidth
requirements for each leg (based on your particular anticipated
application mix) and act accordingly.

If your server just has one 10/100 NIC, you won't get any more total
throughput than it can provide, so IT may be the ultimate bottleneck.
Adjust that thought if you have more than one server.

Also consider that Gigabit networks are coming down in price and may
allow cheap increase in the trunk speeds without recabling fairly soon.

Switches are cheap enough now that I doubt there's much use for hubs
any more.

That's my 2 cents.