I’ve really landed on my feet here.
Background
Our road recently got upgraded to full fibre so I switched my ADSL supplier from 300MB to 1G (is it still ADSL?!?). I also have cable broadband at 600MB so last year bought an omada router with dual wan, then bought two EAPs and been quite happy with the speeds. My equipment includes a desktop PC as home server, and a mini PC with pihole and home assistant.
Cable broadband (virgin media) just came up to renewal so they offered me 1G at same price (£35 a month) to compete with the new speeds on my street.
The new 1G ADSL provider had incorrect info on their website so ended up on CGNAT instead of Dynamic IP. It said they have dynamic IP for 1G and 3G lines, so part of the reason I went for 1G was this, which I made clear to them. They took a while to try and fix it and were pretty poor so just for offered a 3G upgrade for £39pm and 6 months free !!!
They’re coming on Monday to replace the modem \router for a 3G one. I can keep the old router (brand new 1G wifi 6 router) as a mesh.
Advice needed
Please help me figure out what I need to change to make the most of it?! I purposefully didn’t go beyond 1G as was not expecting this much speed for many, many years!
If anybody knows good resources on upgrading speeds past 1G please let me know.
For my home network, do I just sell everything I have and start again? Do I just use their modem and WiFi?
Do I need to check all my wires and potentially upgrade them? How do you check the speeds if they don’t have them printed?
On my home server, do I need to upgrade the network card to get the most out of it? Will it be fine if the connection to the pihole DNS is still 1G if it’s only requesting addresses?
I am sorry for anyone on lower speeds seeing this with envy. I do appreciate how lucky I am.
TLDR: broadband provider messed up so got ridiculously cheap upgrade to 3G ADSL and also upgraded to 1G Cable (dual wan 4G). How do I make the most of this given my equipment is all 1G?!?
If you want to start the most effective, upgrade your router or primary switch to 2.5G or 10G. Then at least there is a low likelihood of a bottleneck when your devices are communicating internally with each other and youll have overhead downstream. Then, if you have multiple switches, prioritize the highest bandwitch between them over upgrading your devices beyond 1gb nic’s.
I use an opnsense router with 2.5g nic’s, and then I have a 2.5g switch and a 1gb switch than are connected via a 10gb fiber link. (This is all enterprise ubiquity level stuff). But all my downstream devices and switches are 1gb snd I have no plans to upgrade intentionally. Internally, I won’t see bottlenecks often since communication between the switches and modems is enough to support multiple devices spamming 1gb/s file transfers simultaneously (not that itll happen often lol)
So my WiFi access points, primary NAS, and my most used PC are all on 2.5gb connections since they could benefit. But everything else is on 1gb since the switch has way more ports and was way cheaper.
I’m not against buying 10g switches for future proofing, but they’re still too costly for my needs, and its unlikely I’ll wish I had 10g any time soon esp when it comes to internet. Even if I upgrade beyond 1gb fiber service, it’d be so thay multiple devices can fully saturate a 1gb NIC at the same time, not so one computer can speed test 3gb+.
Thay said, what I have is overkill, but i enjoy some homelab tinkering.