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Overkill Router and Dumb switch VS Consumer Router and Overkill Switch

random_australian

Hey Guys and Gals 

 

At this point this is more of a thought experiment but may lead to upgrades down the line. Also please note I'm leaving WiFi out of this discussion on purpose as I'm a Firm believer in running dedicated APs because I don't need the headache and family constantly pestering me about bad WiFi.

 

So as stated for a home network would you go with an Overkill Router and regular old unmanaged switches or a more reasonable Consumer/Prosumer Router and Overkill Managed/Layer 3 Switch?

 

I look forward to your informed opinions, now fight ?

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4 minutes ago, random_australian said:

Hey Guys and Gals 

 

At this point this is more of a thought experiment but may lead to upgrades down the line. Also please note I'm leaving WiFi out of this discussion on purpose as I'm a Firm believer in running dedicated APs because I don't need the headache and family constantly pestering me about bad WiFi.

 

So as stated for a home network would you go with an Overkill Router and regular old unmanaged switches or a more reasonable Consumer/Prosumer Router and Overkill Managed/Layer 3 Switch?

 

I look forward to your informed opinions, now fight ?

I would go overkill router and switch

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I have the Netgear R7000 router with a cheap 20$ dummy switch myself with no issues. I only have the switch as I wanted/needed more ethernet ports. 

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If you game, it all comes to the latency... if a monitor you go for frames per seconds... in network it's packets per seconds.  And a packet is encapsulated, if you have the option of Jumbo frame, disable it for gaming, but enabled it for downloading large files.

 

Now that said, you will be bottleneck by the slower of the two!!!! because the latency adds up per device!!!

 

And yeah AP over router rabbit ears all the ways. 

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1 hour ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

How much bandwidth are we thinking? For normal home use or small buiness use, a switch won't do that much.

I would say "Abnormal home use" a sharehouse full of gamers or a family who games and let's through a few concurrent Netflix/YouTube/PrimeVideo streams on top

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Unless you need VLANs an unmanaged switch is fine - and if you do need VLANs the basic “Smart” switches available these days aren’t bad (they used to be garbage). So I would spend more money on the router, to a certain point. A Netgate (PFSense) appliance, Mikrotik router, or something from Ubiquiti (Edge or Unifi) are my choices, in that order.

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I would probably go for Overkill router and unmanaged switch. Most consumers don't need Layer 3 switches / VLANs (Maybe PoE though if they have a lot of cameras / APs)

 

I have an Edgerouter 4 and Edgeswitch 24-250W, but I'm learning about networking so it's used in home labbing.

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I diffidently agree with scottyseng. Your router has a very real impact on your internet performance. Getting a router with a powerful duel-core CPU (a few new ones even have quad) will really help if you have multiple devices connecting. Any basic gigabit switch will meet your needs if you are mainly just connecting to the internet. If you have a high end NAS with several heavy users, then maybe a slightly nicer switch could help, but even that is a stretch. Unless you have multiple devices all pushing near gig speeds at the same time, you don't really need a more powerful switch. If you really want one, the Netgear Smart switches are a good compromise, not too much more than consumer switches but have higher performance and some fun features to play with.

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