I pay $50/mo for 1Gbs here in TN. How low can you actually go on the price? Typically you don’t see anything less than $50/mo for Internet that not exceptionally bad. I’d keep the 1Gbs. Most routers these days are capable of 1Gbs unless QoS is needed at that speed too.

For switches, it’s pretty much a commodity item. I prefer Trendnet at home because they actually had a simulator on their website showing the GUI. For more professional gear, I’d use FS switches. For AP’s, I use Grandstream.

You could actually expect less than 20Mbs because of congestion issues assuming no QoS and you’re right that any port might get more at any particular moment of time. This is mean to be an illustration of bottlenecks and not an implication of layer-2 load balancing. The traffic just can’t be more than what the bottleneck will allow.

Link speed is your hard limit – you can’t go faster than that. Nothing gets divided up just because a device is on. The concept of bottlenecks is what’s important. If you had a 100Mbs switch (with 1Gbs uplink) and a 1Gbs router with a 500Mbs ISP speed, a PC on the switch will be bottlenecked at your 100mbs switch port – it won’t be able to go beyond 100mbs. If you have 5 PC’s on that 100Mbs switch all trying to do 100Mbs each (since that’s the bottleneck of the switch), each PC will be able to do 100Mbs and since you have a 500Mbs speed connection – each PC should get 100Mbs. The switch uplink will pass 500Mbs/1000Mbs and the router will pass 500Mbs to the ISP. If you add a 6th PC trying to do 100Mbs then it gets bottlenecked at the ISP link since it can only do 500Mbs even though the router can do 1Gbs.

If your 100Mbs switch had no 1Gbs uplink then the fastest switchport to the router would be 100Mbs. In the first scenario of 5 PC’s trying to do 100Mbs each, they would all be throttled to roughly 20Mbs since the total connection out of the switch would be 100Mbs. If only 1 device tried downloading, the limit would be 100Mbs for that device since the limit would be the link speed of the switch to the router.

If you had a PC directly connected to your router at 1Gbs bypassing any 100Mbs switch limits, the bottleneck would be at the ISP of 500Mbs. If you had devices on the 100Mbs switch (with 100Mbs uplink) trying to download at max capacity while your PC was directly connected, your expected speed would be 400Mbs since 100Mbs would be going to the switch.

The concept of a 24-port Gigabit switch with only 1Gbs uplink works because no device is expected to be constantly utilizing 1Gbs for a sustained period of time. They also supply full bandwidth to ports across the switch that don’t have to go across a common uplink. PC A and PC B can talk to each other at 1Gbs if on the same switch while PC C is talking to the Internet at 1Gbs. As long as the devices aren’t utilizing a common port at the same time, there’s no bottleneck.

The reason not to use VLAN 1 is that there’s a concept of a native VLAN and VLAN 1 is normally the default native VLAN as well as the default VLAN for any unconfigured port. It’s easier to just not use it. The OP has used it for their existing VLAN. The biggest problem with that is that the management VLAN for the AP would be the same as the tagged VLAN for the wireless clients potentially allowing a WiFi client access to the management port of the AP.

Most just rent US servers these days.

They’re basically a commodity item. I’d suggest the Trendnet TEG-S50G @ $15.29 via Amazon or the Trendnet TEG-S82G if you want 8-port @ $24.99 via Amazon.

Prices go up if you want a managed switch or a PoE switch or the combo.

For me the answer would be no because I have a very specific idea what a router is and what it should do and that does NOT include WiFi. What’s the throughput (with firewall/nat enabled)? Does it support QoS algorithms like FQ_CODEL or CAKE (and at what speed)? What are the firewall capabilities? Does it support DNS proxy? What are the VPN capabilities?

If you want WiFI, get an AP.

Every cable you plugged in on the LAN side is 100Mbs (assuming those ports are configured for auto negotiation). You either have 2 pair patch cables rather than 4 pair or you have a wiring problem in your home where all 8-conductors aren’t being used. If you have a cheap Gigabit switch, try putting it on these cables and see what the link speed is on each cable and plug the switch into the LAN side of the router and see what that speed is. At the very least, the gigabit switch should show up as 1-gigabit link speed – if it doesn’t then your router has an issue assuming a good patch cable.

Why are you looking for a media converter? The ONT converts from fiber to RJ45. You should just be extending the RJ45. You can extend the single-mode fiber too but you shouldn’t and it wouldn’t require a media converter. The ONT should be your ISP’s demark.