I’ve been prepping my home network for the promise of “fibre coming soon” in my city.

That meant wrapping the house in Cat6A like a giant arachnid nest, and having a couple desktops with 2.5GbE on board, but I’m not sure what to do about the routing setup. I have three Ethernet runs to “30cm from the ISP equipment” now.

For gigabit in this scenario, the turnkey solution is any random Wi-Fi/router/firewall box which has 1Gb WAN and four 1Gb LAN ports. But where do you go when you start wanting 2.5GbE?

It seems like the “Wifi/Router/firewall” boxes with 2.5GbE ports are quite spendy, especially if you want more than one LAN port. I know a lot of this cost is because they tend to be the latest-and-greatest in terms of Wi-Fi, with 82 antennae, but that’s only a secondary consideration for me with the heavy users on wires. Hell, my smartphone only supports the 2.4GHz band!

It seems like other options include:

• 2-box solution: A slightly cheaper Wifi-Router with 2.5GbE WAN and one LAN port and using a cheap unmanaged 2.5 switch to provide the desired port count.
• 3-box solution: Said cheap unmanaged switch, plus a wired-centric router, and use the old Wifi/Router as an access point only

I’m sort of not thrilled about the two or three-box solutions as they have poor “wife acceptance factor” as they say. A bunch of random boxes that inevitably won’t stack neatly and have three big ugly wall warts. Is there some magic product that would fit my needs perfectly I’m missing?