this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2024
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What’s wrong with having a switch? And why build in capability that people aren’t necessarily gonna use?
The intent of this is to be a cheap but capable homelab router. Building in more ports / integrating a managed or unmanaged switch / adding PoE is only going to drive up cost. BYO is absolutely the answer to “I want more ports” here.
Literally the ONLY thing they would need to do to make this perfect is to make the LAN port upgradable to 2.5G - anything past that and people are probably going to be looking at more serious enterprise-grade hardware anyways.
Having at least one more port makes debugging a lot easier, and it also opens the door to port-based VLANs. If they had three ports, it would be infinitely more useful to me, and any more ports than that is just icing on the cake.
But only two ports means you have to get a separate switch unless you'll only ever have the one ethernet device.
In terms of tradeoffs, drop the Wi-Fi capability entirely and add more physical ports. I doubt the Wi-Fi module is any good (doesn't even do 6GHz), and it doesn't seem to be replaceable either. If you're going for a home-lab setup, you're going to want more ports. If you're going for a regular home user use-case, you'd prefer a better Wi-Fi card. Maybe sell two models, one w/ better Wi-Fi (full 6E standard) and one w/ more ports and no Wi-Fi.
Fair points.
I’d say they could make three versions:
Yeah, I'd be down with that, and I'd go for the last one. I only need 1 2.5G port, though 2x is always nice to have. The extra gigabit lines would be nice for separated VLANs, like running my camera network (don't want that touching the net).