In the pursuit of doing crazy things on a Raspberry Pi, my latest endeavor was to see if I could consistently pipe more than a gigabit per second of traffic through WiFi using a Raspberry Pi.
In the past, I had some faltering attempts where sometimes things would work—sort-of—using WiFi 6 (802.11ax, 40 MHz bandwidth, 2x2) using an Intel AX200 M.2 card on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4.
For the past year, I've slowly upgraded parts of my network to 10 Gigabit. But 10 Gigabit switches, NICs, and even cabling is a bit more expensive and sometimes annoying to deal with than the very-cheap 1 Gbps equipment most homelabbers are used to.
I dipped my toes into the 2.5 Gbps waters once I got a NAS with 2.5G ports—you can use standard USB NICs that cost less than $50, or PCIe cards for even less. And cabling is easier, since 2.5G works fine over Cat5e (which I already have run to most of my house).
So in order to install a new WiFi 6 Access Point upstairs—and get it's full bandwidth—I upgraded my main 1 Gbps PoE+ switch to a 2.5 Gbps PoE+ switch.
Looking around at options, most switches with more than 4 2.5 Gbps ports with PoE+ seem to cost upwards of $300. And knowing that I'd like to expand my network a bit in the future, I finally splurged a bit and bought this 20-port monstrosity: