My network has undergone a number of transformations. At first, I was using a Netgear Nighthawk r7800 wifi router connected to my cable modem. From the start I didn't want to use Xfinity's equipment so I bought my own. Virtually nothing in the house was hard wired. Then I loaded OpenWRT onto the Netgear router so I could experiment with VLANs. It worked OK for a while, but once I decided to implement VLANs, I pretty quickly moved to a fanless J4125 pfSense device (which was my first device with 2.5gbe NICs), a wifi6 WAP and a 5 port gigabit managed switch to replace the Netgear box. When I ran out of ports on that original TPlink switch, I upgraded to a mokerlink 8 port 2.5gbe managed switch. More out of planning for the future than current need for 2.5gbe at the time. As I began to stand up more wired devices in my home lab, I quickly ran out of ports. I was using one link to connect to the pfsense router, one to connect to the WAP, three to connect to my Proxmox nodes, one to connect to my Ring alarm base station, one to connect to my Pi-star ham radio hotspot, and 2 to connect to my NAS devices. Over time, I upgraded most of my wired NICs to 2.5gbe or in the case of my HPz640 and Synology devices, I purchased 2.5gbe usb NICs. I actually ran out of ports and had to daisy chain in my original 5 port 1gbe switch to service some of the less important items like the ring alarm and the Pi-star hot spot.ย
Just within the last month, I decided to upgrade once again. I purchased a Mokerlink managed switch that has 24 2.5gbe ports and 6 SFP+ ports. With the new abundance of ports, I kind of went a little crazy with link aggregation. I now have 2 2.5gbe LACP links from my pfSense box to the switch, and the same between my two NAS machines and the switch. My primary Proxmox node now connects via a 10gbe copper copper connection to a SFP+ transceiver. ALL of this is WAY overkill. My internet connections (I have two because I work at home, and I can't work without internet) max out at 600mbps. So honestly I could get by gigabit ethernet and not notice a difference. But I hope to upgrade to fiber someday, and a lot of this is just for the sake of learning and doing. But on the plus side, I have also set up pfSense with redundant WAN connections. They are set to fail over automatically, and my web servers go out through the T-mobile 5G WAN (via a firewall rule policy) since the upload speed of TMobile is 2X of the upload speed Xfinity gives me.ย
Ethernet does not extend outside of my office. The rest of the home is served by my WAP. But it doesn't do too bad. I think it is limited by the gigabit connection from the WAP to the switch. Speed test from my dining room computer to my Proxmox node running speedtest in a docker container averages 850gbps upload and about 790gbps download.ย