Or maybe my Cisco APs work better. Thoughput is fine on my APs. You have no real idea as you don't do this.Your throughput may be lower, or your connection rates could be even higher with less APs properly spaced. Or maybe you have all concrete walls and it is warranted. But it is not prudent to suggest everyone put an AP in every room. I don't have any problems, my throughput hits the peak of what AC is capable of (except wireless to wireless since my 1900 doesn't have the horsepower for it). Anything I'm doing large transfers with, at least one end is hardwired so no issues there.
Using QOS on a VLAN on an L3 switch happens at L2, no different than an L2 switch. There are additional QOS things you can do at L3 but COS/TOS is applied by the VOIP phone, and the switch is simply configured (typically by default) to prioritize that traffic at L2, to pass it upstream, where an eventual router also prioritizes it. L2 is the first place to apply QOS in a typical LAN environment in order to have prioritization, otherwise everyone is fighting for bandwidth until they hit the L3 interface. If you're segmenting your L3 switch into multiple VLANs with multiple ports in each, hate to break it to you, but your QOS is probably being done at L2.
Obviously if you have 600 clients you shouldn't be putting them in the same L2 segment/broadcast domain, you have a distribution tier (pair of L3 switches or routers) with an access tier (L2 switches, each with one VLAN/subnet, sometimes two if you are running VOIP out of band). But that's not what we're talking about here, if you have 600 clients, snbforums and SOHO AIO routers are not for you.
I was not talking about Cisco SMB switches, those are not much better than SOHO stuff. Even their lower level enterprise L3 switches like Cat 3K series (and the Cat 9k that are replacing them) are not excellent at consistent low latency and jitter. Those are in the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars new. Luckily most audio and video applications are programmed these days to adjust for and deal with latency and jitter fluctuations and deal with it, so as long as there is not severe saturation somewhere, QOS typically isn't even needed at all (in the home environment anyway).
If you want the best latency, the Nexus 3548 is an amazing switch, can do L3, NAT, VLANs (no QOS though) at around 250ns. If you get rid of L3, NAT and VLANs it drops to about 150. Even with QOS it is only in the 1-2 uS range. The switch is only about $15k but unfortunately the 10G SFPs are absurdly priced even at the 92% discount we get. And of course if you use a non-Cisco SFP, it disables the ultra low latency and you jump up to a few uSec through the switch.
L3 adds plenty of overhead on top of L2 but that really has nothing to do with QOS or performance, all of that is done in hardware. But routing is slower than switching, even in an L3 switch.
Your belief that L3 switches are needed because broadcasts "stop all network traffic" is completely misguided. Especially since you still have broadcasts. Even if you put every device in its own VLAN or router interface, there are still broadcasts. If you really want to design for the future and have a professional network, look into CCNA or Network+ or something like that to gain an understanding of the fundamentals. Once you have that, everything makes a ton more sense. Or do it for a living for a few decades like I have, you start to think like a network device and it makes even more sense.
Yes, the high end Cisco switches are nice. You don't bother to talk about power requirements or AC requirements. I would not want to pay the bill as they pull a lot of power. I bought as big of Cisco switches we could get for the core of our big sites back in my days with dual power supplies from ATT as they were our vendor for Cisco networking gear. We did about a million dollars every year for gear and circuits. Of course that was a long time ago for me. I retied over 15 years ago.
And by the way I passed CCNA way before you as I am a lot older. You were probably a kid when I passed the CCNA.
You act like you know layer 3 switches, but you don't run any of it now. It seems like you run an all-in-one router, Asus at home which I do not get. It seems dumb to me as there are lots of draw backs doing that. You should have made a lot of money being a big network guy, but you don't come across that way. So, I am not really sure you can really do it, maybe just talk.
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