Fibre will be available at my place in either Feb or March (yay). Therefore time to upgrade my home network to gigabit speeds. Will also be installing a patch panel and wallplates, instead of cables coming out of the floor in all of the rooms and a big mess in my network cupboard.


The shopping list:
Cat 6 patch panel - most likely 24 port.
Cat 6 double wall plates - at least 5
Cat 6 cable - already have a pile of 5m or so shorts but will need new cable for the longer runs.
Jar of cat 6 plugs.
Gigabit unmanaged switches  a 16 port (at least) and an 8 port to live behind the TV.
Gigabit managed switch / router - will plug into Chorus ONT and from there feed to both switches, a wireless AP (already have one but need to see if it still works), a flatmates ADSL modem (he will stay on ADSL  instead of going to fibre), And maybe some sort of web server.

AFAIK the managed switch will need to do VLAN tagging, different firewall rules / routes per port, Nat routing, DHCP (unless I can use the DHCP server in the flatmates modem or plug in an old ADSL modem just for DHCP) And might as well add in IPv6 support as well.

Need some suggestions on which model of managed switch is best for me.


The budget, Hopefully it will be less than a grand all up, but can be more if it is worth it.


Thanks in advance everyone.