• empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    English
    54·
    21 days ago

    Very weird ethernet setup. Gives you a 2.5g port so you could take advantage of the faster fiber many people have access to now, but only a 1g port so you can’t even use the benefits of the faster network on your wired LAN. Not something most people’s internet connections care about, but a weird thing to include regardless; it would have been better to leave them both 1g ports and shave $5+ off the sales price.

    I’m sure this is a limit of the commodity chipset but it honestly doesn’t have a place in the network I’m planning to build out as fully 2.5g compatible next year.

    • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
      38·
      21 days ago

      I was going to say “with a 2.5g wan port and 1g switch ports, it can saturate 2.5 switch ports” but then I realized that it doesn’t have switch ports, it has one WAN and one LAN port. Definitely a weird choice.

    • JWBananas@lemmy.worldEnglish
      19·
      21 days ago

      The included MT7976C wifi can theoretically saturate the 2.5 Gbps uplink on its own. The use case is overall throughput for a mixture of wired and wireless devices.

      • sem@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        1·
        21 days ago

        It doesn’t make sense to me to future proof wifi but not wired for $5 more, but maybe it makes sense to people in rural places

      • empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        English
        1·
        21 days ago

        While that’s great, it’s not of much use to most people if they can’t saturate their link from either wifi or ethernet at separate times. It leaves a lot of wasted capacity imo.

    • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.meEnglish
      11·
      20 days ago

      I’m struggling to think what one can even do with just two ethernet ports of different speeds. It’s begging to be used as a gateway, VPN or firewall but you can’t because you’ll top out at 1G anyway. And assuming one of them is the LAN side, supposedly it’ll be going to a switch so the router will never see LAN traffic anyway, only stuff through it which hits the bandwidth limitation.

      I guess technically one could bond the WiFi and 1G link to make use of the 2.5G link? Or as an AP like it’s got 2.5G upstream and passes through another AP down the line using the 1G port.

      Very questionable specs.

      E: it occured to me this looks like a potentially really good standalone AP if you give it 2.5G upstream and then branch off to another device down the line like some Ubiquiti ones do. But the form factor is ugly as hell to be mounted on a ceiling…

      • planish@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        20 days ago

        Usually the routers you install OpenWRT on are really a CPU with one port to a VLAN-capable switch, and the port labeled WAN on the device is just VLAN’d separately by default. One cool thing OpenWRT lets you do on “normal” hardware is change the VLAN settings on the switch ports which are not accessible under stock firmware.

        But if they are shipping “just” the router piece and making people go get their own VLAN-capable switch, I’m not sure what hardware exactly they expect people to use? And I’m not sure what being connected to the switch over one real 2.5G cable is going to do to LAN/WAN throughput, vs. how a “normal” router ties the CPU into the switch through means not known to mortal minds. Maybe it is just as good, maybe it is a huge bottleneck. It is definitely going to add cost over the $89 sticker price.

        But if most people are just going to run fiber modem straight to WiFi, maybe this is the right config actually?

    • kalleboo@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      20 days ago

      I just got upgraded to 10 Gbit internet the other week and was looking at routers, and it seems to be a surprisingly common configuration (or routers with 10 Gbit WAN and 2.5 Gbit LAN ports). I think router manufacturers are banking on 99% of people only caring about Wi-Fi and then being fooled by those “up to 7000 mbit over wifi!” numbers. And then due to scale those are the only chipsets that are affordable.

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      20 days ago

      Yeah, you’d use the 1G port for uplink and 2.5G for internal network use, assuming most of your traffic is internal (e.g. streaming from a NAS or something).

      But yeah, the port setup is weird. I’d honestly rather have all 1G ports and have more of them (w/ active PoE) than a single 2.5G port.