Fiber to your home: using all bandwith in your LAN?

A colleague of mine changed ISP and choose a 60Mbps internet connection. He wondered what router and other LAN-equipment he should use to fully utilize his internet connection. That made me think: i really did not think about that, when i bought a router for our new 35 Mbps fiber internet connection: i assumed the Cisco Linksys WRT54G2 would be new enough to handle it.

So i received some links (Dutch) to info stating you really have to watch "LAN-WAN-throughput". Say what? Well, basically, you have to check whether all the boxes in your LAN support the big pipe your ISP delivers. It would be a waste to only use 2 lanes of the 10 lane super highway at your frontdoor, right?

You should check specs of your router and see what WAN-speed your router supports. Maybe your router is in this list, which also is a nice list when you think about buying a new router! My Cisco Linksys WRT54G2 seems to support my connection for now. But if i needed to buy new, the D-Link DIR-655 (and newer 855) do seem to have a nice price performance ratio. If you have a lot of wired connections in the LAN, you might want to check whether you need a switch and make sure that is able to handle the load. For this i would check out Netgear switches like the NETGEAR GS108T or newer models.

Finally, you want to make sure the clients (PC, Mac, Linux etc) utilize the available bandwidth. O, and you want to think of making it a little future proof (no new standards on the horizon?), ensure you pick a supplier that will last some years and delivers firmware updates often enough and make sure everything has enough options and safety build in. Go figure ;-).

Want to check your current ISP connection? Use Speedtest.net. And check out the SmallNetBuilder site, check the menu in the top of the screen: they have basic info, but also charts comparing stuff like routers, nas, wireless etc.