bill001g said:
You might as well do it in steps and figure out what features are most important as you go. I would start with a $20 gig switch and put all your wired devices on it. This will allow you run all your wired stuff at 1g.
If you go and research some of the sites that have run real world type tests on wireless you will find that unless you go to 802.11ac you will not get over 100m down on most routers so the lack of gig ports is not the bottleneck. Even the 802.11ac routers come nowhere close to even 1/2 the 1300m speeds they talk about. Then when you add multiple devices all using wireless at the same time it degrades even more.
So for anything wired a cheap gig switch will give you pretty much the optimum network for the lowest cost. If you want toys to play with the asus ac68u is the fastest rated device on the market and it supports dd-wrt if all its current options are not good enough. To get the high wireless speeds you would have to get all 802.11ac devices and all these must support the 3x3 mimo which is very rare.
I think we are still a little too early on the 802.11ac and now they are coming out with even a newer standard in the fall so do you buy today and get outdated in less than a year ? The key feature I see in the new 802.11ac says it solves some of the issues of many users on the same router at the same time. Something called MU-MiMO. But no device currently has it so nobody know. It would have to be a feature like this to allow wireless with a number of devices to actually get good speeds.
Thanks. I agree that I don't want to spend a lot of money to be on the bleeding edge and then be obsolete in a few months.
Sounds like adding a gig E switch is the cheapest option but will I hit a bottleneck when I go out of the gig E switch to the wifi router since the router doesn't support gig E?