Internal 2Gbps home network

[rhbvkleef]

I am planning out my new home network and want to have 1Gbps right now but the option to upgrade it later. I will hook up a high-speed NAS and video rendering server to the network requiring a lot of bandwith. It will also contain 2 desktop computers and 1 wireless (n channel) router.

I am planning on buying a switch which will be directly connected my glass fiber modem. It will need to have lacp (for link aggregation) compatibility for the later option to upgrade to 2Gbps lan speed. Can you easily use any gigabit switch with lacp compat for this or need any specific one in order to be able to connect directly to WAN?

Can you suggest any -somewhat- cheap switches for this? It will have to be at least 8 ports.

 

[bill001g]

Only a router can connect to a wan because the NAT feature can not be done at even close to switching speeds. Switching is done with asic chips because the function is pretty simple. NAT the device must modify every single packet and recalculate all the checksums etc etc. It takes huge cpu power to run even at a gig.

Now you can of course put a switch in front of a router and the switch will run all your in house devices.

Still link aggregation will not accomplish what you want. It is really designed for a lot of machine to access a central server and that server is running the bonding to increase its capacity. I will let it to you to dig for the details but the problem is that the best load balance you can get with link aggregation is load balance by session not by packet. A single session will only use 1 link no matter what you do, this is to prevent the packet out of order problems. With a large number of machines and sessions you can get a fair utilization of the links when you have only a small number of machines it does not work real well.

Since the cost of 10g interfaces have come down you do not see link aggregation used much in commercial installs either. When it is used it mostly used as a high speed failover method rather than for capacity.