Replacing AC88U, serving 6x CAT5e, all WiFi from AiMesh nodes...suggestions?

[neatchee]

I find myself in an odd situation, thanks to the folks who built my house not understanding what they were doing when they wired the place up, and I could use an outside opinion...

• The house was built with 6x CAT5e runs for LAN, plus another run for WAN to the fiber ONT in the garage
• All ethernet converges in the Master Bedroom's closet, in a wall-mounted enclosure
• I've been using my AC88U with the antennae removed and wifi fully disabled; it barely fits inside the enclosure and wifi signal is too weak from interference to be useful beyond the bedroom
• 3 of the CAT5e runs are connected to AiMesh Mini AX (XD4) nodes around the house that provide wireless connectivity for most devices
• 1 CAT5e run is connected to a gigabit unmanaged switch in the entertainment room, serving the main TV, a headless Ubuntu server (for pi-hole, Jellyfin server, etc), and the collection of game consoles
• 1 CAT5e run is connected directly to my gaming PC. Any gaming for which I care about network performance happens here, exclusively
• 1 CAT5e run is connected to a T-Mobile Cell Spot in our bedroom that cannot be moved

Now that the RT-AC** line has reached EOL, I'm looking at moving up to a RT- or GT-AX** router

However, I've noticed that the newer units - e.g. the AX88U Pro - only have, at most, 5x LAN ports, while the older models - e.g. non-pro 88U - retain the full 8 ports found in some of the AC series.

So what's my best solution here?
I would feel silly buying older hardware just for the extra ports
But I'd also feel silly adding a switch inside the enclosure, effectively cutting the concurrent bandwidth to two of the ethernet runs in half
And since all the ethernet is CAT5e (despite the house being built in 2019 ) I get no value out of 2.5Gb ports
Plus the router will just be buried in the enclosure anyway, so any WiFi advancements go to waste

I need to stick with Asus if I'm going to continue using my AiMesh nodes, otherwise I'd be looking into building out a router from scratch with no WiFi

Thoughts? Suggestions? Is there an option I'm not thinking of? A way to get the router outside the enclosure without pissing off my wife with exposed cabling?

Thanks in advance for any ideas

 

[L&LD]

Don't buy the AX88U (non-pro). Consider yourself lucky your current router works with ports 5-8 in use. Many users don't see that kind of stability.

Quality Cat5e will handle 2.5GbE traffic no problem. I'm currently using it on a 100' run for an AiMesh node.

Buy the RT-AX88U Pro. Buy as many 2.5GbE switches as you need. Sooner or later, you'll use them. Even with the existing wiring.

 

[neatchee]

Quality Cat5e will handle 2.5GbE traffic no problem. I'm currently using it on a 100' run for an AiMesh node.

I am not super confident that they didn't cheap out so hard that it actually wouldn't, given a few other things around the house they went with :/

 

[L&LD]

Well, it is easy enough to test them.

 

[aaronwt]

Cat5E is designed to handle 2.5 Gbps speeds at 100 meters. Heck, you can even get faster speeds at shorter distances. I'm running 10GbE and 5GbE on some of my short Cat5E runs.
But if worried about bandwidth. Get one of the inexpensive 2.5 GbE switches with one 10G uplink. And get a router with a 10GbE LAN port. I use several of the inexpensive Luanley switches (around $60 now), from Amazon (and there of plenty of other brands). They have one SFP+ port for a 10G uplink and eight 2.5GbE ports. I can easily exceed 9Gbps throughput from the 10GbE uplink (Using an SFP+ 10GbE module), when transferring data to/from multiple unRAID machines. That I have connected to the 2.5GbE ports.

Or get a more expensive QNAP switch($150). I use several of them too. They have two 10GbE ports and four 2.5GbE ports.

 

[Justinh]

I'd also feel silly adding a switch inside the enclosure, effectively cutting the concurrent bandwidth to two of the ethernet runs in half

Can you please explain how/why the bandwidth would be cut in half? And what do you mean by "concurrent bandwidth"?

 

[neatchee]

Can you please explain how/why the bandwidth would be cut in half? And what do you mean by "concurrent bandwidth"?

Since the switch would be connected to the router by a single 1GbE port, if there are two devices connected to the switch both attempting to transfer data at 1gbps each, they would only be able to achieve 500mbps each (assuming both transfers pass through the router). Whereas if the devices were all connected directly to 1GbE ports on the router, the only limiting factor would be the performance of the router

 

[Justinh]

the switch would be connected to the router by a single 1GbE port

Then you could get a model with a 2.5GbE LAN port (+ the 3x or 4x 1GbE ports) and connect a 2.5GbE switch to it.