The best upgrade to my home network only cost me $13
It's easy to spend a lot of money on your home network in an attempt to make it faster, more stable, or more flexible. Faster Wi-Fi standards and upgrading to a mesh router system can all give your LAN a big kick in the pants.
But, there's something to be said for mature, fundamental network infrastructure, and spending less than twenty bucks on an unmanaged switch is probably the best money I've spent on my home network when it comes to bang-for-buck.
What a gigabit switch actually does (and why it's different from your router)
It ticks a different box
A gigabit switch is about as simple as network gear gets. It takes a single Ethernet connection, and allows you to connect multiple Ethernet devices to it. It's useful to think of it as the Ethernet equivalent of a USB hub, although that's very much technically incorrect.
That's all it does. It does no traffic routing, it doesn't support advanced features like VLAN or Quality of Service . It just gets the traffic from each Ethernet cable plugged into it to the single Ethernet from the device higher up in the chain.
Because the switch is "unmanaged", there's nothing to set up. Nothing to monitor or configure. It really is as simple as plugging in multiple devices and the switch figuring it out. The switch will, however, negotiate a link speed and give devices up to a gigabit of bandwidth if possible. From the perspective of the client device, it's just connected to the router as usual.
The real bottleneck in most home networks isn't speed
More Ethernet ports? In this economy?!
Even high-end routers don't have many Ethernet ports, and mesh nodes usually only have one or two. This means you're limited to using Wi-Fi for most of your devices. You have to decide carefully which of your devices should get an Ethernet connection, which will have the most stability and lowest latency, compared to Wi-Fi.
But there are lots of devices that benefit immensely from Ethernet. A gaming PC or laptop should be connected via Ethernet if you want to play online games and need to have a stable and low-latency connection. If you run home servers, like my mini PC Plex server you can see below, then you definitely want to connect it via Ethernet.
Sydney Louw Butler / How-To Geek
Likewise, you want devices like a NAS or smart TV to use Ethernet, because they have high bandwidth and/or stability needs. The four or five ports on your router isn't enough, but plug a switch into one of those ports, and you can multiply your port capacity by a huge amount. Five ports is what will cost you about $13 but you can buy an 8, 16, 24, o4 48-port switch too, if you like.
Don't forget that if you're aiming for 1Gbps speeds, Cat6 Ethernet can sustain that speed up to 100m (328ft) no problem. So you can run a single cable from your router to a room where you need multiple Ethernet ports, and then connect your gigabit switch there, allowing whatever number of devices your switch has room for to connect. Just remember that the combined bandwidth for the switch is still just 1Gbps in total to the rest of the network. After all, you're connected to a single gigabit port on your router.
If you have 2.5Gbps or faster on your router's Ethernet, then you can buy higher spec cables and switches to take advantage of that, but, of course, for internet traffic, nothing can ever go faster than the speed of your WAN connection. Using a $13 5-port switch, I was able to give everything in my office an Ethernet connection!
Sydney Louw Butler / How-To Geek
Why wiring more devices quietly fixes everything
You might be asked why bother with all these wires and switches if you can just choose Wi-Fi? That's a fair question, and the latest version of the technology (Wi-Fi 7) does a great job of offering fast, stable, low-latency connectivity.
The thing is, connecting devices that can use Ethernet to a wired system makes your Wi-Fi perform better too! Every device you take off your Wi-Fi network is one less device that needs routing or frequency spectrum on your network. Ethernet will reduce congestion on your Wi-Fi network, and it will always be an overall net benefit for you. Considering that the switches and cables are dirt cheap, I can't think of any other network upgrade or modification that gives anywhere near this much benefit for so little money and effort.
