Being an engineer, I go for a very large factor of safety and plenty of head room for future expansion.This is way more than you asked but things to consider if you're bored. I feel like nerding out to avoid more important things right now.
A couple things to keep in mind...
My (completely personal) recommendation:
- Even in streaming heavy households, very few people even come close to 100Mbs of bandwidth across their entire house at the same time.
- A 4K stream can use up to roughly 25Mbps, multiplied times how many simultaneous streams you have going - many streams are still 720 or 1080 and upscaled.
- IOT devices, even cameras, use very little bandwidth. Most live recording to the cloud only uses roughly 3Mbps per camera.
- Most devices send/receive brief bursts of data (not including some of the above).
- The type of line matters almost as much as bandwidth. Fiber for instance allows for less latency than say DSL, critical for video calls, gaming, etc.
- I run 2 home servers, have 8 cameras recording 24/7 to the cloud, 72 devices connected to the network, typically 3x 4K video streams, conference calls all day, etc. I have symmetrical, active (not passive) gig fiber and even all of that could be handled with 1/4 of the bandwidth.
- WiFi has a million different variables.
- Channel, RSSI, Noise, etc
- Congestion and overlapping channels
- Wire vs wireless backhaul if mesh or access points (always wired if you can)
- How many hops, using repeaters/extenders (barf) vs access points, wired mesh, etc
- Router/access point WiFi standard (n, ax, ac, be, etc)
- Device WiFi standard support
- Distance between device and router/access point
- Frequency being used (2.4Ghz is slow as **** but long range, 5Ghz is very fast but shorter reaching, 6Ghz is largely new, very fast, but very short reaching
- 20, 40, 80, 120, 360MHz bandwidth
- # of simultaneous data packets (i.e. do you need QOS or not - typically 500Mhz is the dividing line)
- Double NAT situations
- Deep packet inspection turned on/off (very impactful)
- A bunch more but running out of time
- Don't waste money trying to get WiFi "7" as MLO and other things need a lot of work still, range is very short on 6Ghz, and will be many years before enough devices to support it.
- Consider how many devices, and what kind you will be running to try and estimate the bandwidth you need at peak times.
- Change from a carrier router or put in bridge mode if all possible.
- I always recommend a wireless (wired only) router with a switch that then links to your downstream WiFi devices of choice. I have to drop this recommendation if you aren't a nerd.
- Order of preference for setup:
- Wired router with wired access points (more is not always better for # of APs)
- Consumer router with wired access points
- MoCA (has come a long ways)
- Consumer router with mesh APs
- Asus has best consumer routers
- Mesh recommendations below
- Netgear is improving the hardware but every feature is extra money and devices crazy expensive
- Mesh systems (dedicated backhaul frequency/channel preferred)
- ASUS AIMesh is really maturing
- Eero is very easy and pretty reliable
- Orbi can be great or terrible, $$$
- Google is very easy and pretty reliable
So I went with 1 Gig Metronet fiber, eero max 7, cat6 ethernet cable to high speed ethernet cards in the computers and cat6 ethernet cable to the main TV. All the other stuff is on WiFi. I have one extender but it really isn't needed. Suitably overbuilt! But I can handle 5+Gig service if ever needed!
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