mcribgaming

Scenario 2 is more accurate for BOTH cases, but not because you used a switch. Scenario 1 is false.

It's the ISP provided speed that is the limited resource. You have 100 Mbps of Internet service, which can be consumed by any single connection. If multiple connections want to use Internet, that speed gets split up between all the devices trying to use it simultaneously.

It does not have to be in equal pieces. If one connection only wants 20 Mbps of Internet, another connection can use the other 80 Mbps remaining.

Using a switch does not affect the consumption of Internet from devices unless the switch port speed itself is lower than your maximum ISP speed. This isn't true in your example.

Yes, it's worth moving from cable to fiber. I'd pay a premium to do so, but it's often cheaper.

You didn't specify your fiber provider, but in most cases, they will provide you with an ONT during installation, which is something that converts a fiber connection into an Ethernet connection. They also usually provide some sort of gateway or router too, but that can either be optional or required from them, depending on the ISP. You just need to connect this ONT directly to your existing router, or put their required gateway into "Bridge Mode" or "Passthrough Mode" first and connect that to your existing router.

Either way you usually get a choice to where they put the ONT / gateway. In your case, you can have them install this right where your modem (and router) is at today, right next to each other. As long as that area is accessible, they can probably use the same hole as your coax coming from the outside into your basement.

It's very likely the install will mean no changes for your network at all, other than retiring the coax and modem, and now using their ONT. If they require use of their gateway, then just put it into Bridge Mode as already stated. Just think of the ONT as your new modem for fiber.

Just be present during install, and show them where you have things right now, and the installer will work with you to put it in a good spot.

You'd do better by finding out more information about your Mexico ISP and what are their requirements than asking here. Find out if you're required to use their gateway, how that gateway is connected, and whether or not the gateway can be put into "Bridge Mode" or "Passthrough Mode" to support your own router.

Most likely your Cisco is all you need if the gateway can be put into Bridge Mode, OR you have fiber service with an ONT and no requirements to use their gateway (just return it to them). But checking with the ISP is easier than us guessing what is needed from them.

Keep the switch and add a dedicated Access Point in your office to give you a new strong source of WiFi in that area. The Access Point I recommend for such scenarios s the Ubiquiti U6 Lite or Pro.

You can also use any off-the-shelf, all-in-one router like an ASUS or Netgear to do the same thing. Just put this router into "Access Point Mode" according to its manual. You can either just attach it to your current switch, or use the router's 4 built in LAN ports as a switch and then use your existing switch elsewhere.

$2 a foot? You're hired! I'll even fly you in at that price.

This is charity level pricing.

Replacing one mesh system with another rarely changes the effective range. All home equipment has a cap on transmission power by law, and just about every one of them uses this max limit, as it's very low and extremely easy to accomplish by any manufacturer. They also often use the same chipsets. They do often have different antenna patterns, so you will see some differences here and there, but it will not be drastic.

Rather, you should experiment with the placement of your Orbi nodes. Place them closer together than you might think. Do not place a node directly in a dead spot, but rather in between the dead spot and your main Orbi router. A good strategy is to place the secondary node in the center of your house on the same floor as your main Orbi, or on a different floor, but directly above or below your main Orbi. Often, just changing the angle of attack is enough to change a dead spot into a usable one.

If you're using wireless backhaul, try reducing the number of nodes to the minimum. Most houses only need two Orbi units at most, three for unusually large or weirdly shaped houses.

6 GHz actually has worse wall and floor penetration than 5 or 2.4 GHz, so that won't help you.

Finally, look carefully to see if you can potentially wire in some of your Orbis. If you have coaxial cable or old phone lines, they can often be converted to Ethernet. Doing so will allow you to wire in Orbis in many locations, giving you excellent WiFi coverage.

Travel routers are built for this. One of the leading companies in travel routers is GL.iNet, go look at their product line.

The bitrate of 4K from streaming services like Disney and Netflix is much, much lower than your UHD Blu-ray rips. They recommend having a 16-25 Mbps connection to stream 4K, but the average bitrate is even lower. It's closer to 6-8 Mbits. They just recommend a higher Internet connection because of how streaming works (small bursts of higher rates with a lot of idle time in between).

You can calculate it accurately by just downloading the movie (if the streamer lets you, like premium subscriptions do) to see the file size, and then dividing that size by the length of the movie in seconds. That will give you the average bits per second by definition. You'll be surprised how low it is, because streamers use compression, while "pure" UHD Blu-ray avoids compression to satisfy purists.

As to how much data a streamer uses, it's immense. It's a huge chunk of the data on the Internet at any given time, with estimates in 40-60% range for all the streamers in aggregate. Look into "Content Delivery Networks" (CDNs) to see how it's delivered on a global scale. It's actually very impressive.

Fooling someone into installing malware is far, far more effective than someone trying to penetrate your firewall with a frontal attack, or brute forcing passwords, or faking certificates, man in the middle, or anything "hacking".

Ransomware, one of the proven successful cyber attacks, is pretty much just trying to get a secretary to click on an email attachment that is malevolent. Or faking an ID badge or uniform and just walking into a company and installing ransomware off of a USB drive. Or promising you a new iPhone if you just install this little file to verify you've won. Or pretending to be the IT department and asking someone for their passwords.

Social Engineering has always been magnitudes easier to do than any kind of "using computers to break into other computers" that we normally think of when "hacking" is mentioned.

Installing pirated games is a known and common tactic for getting malware behind your firewall, no direct hacking needed. Just set the bait, and the fish hook themselves.

Just having a basic firewall, which all routers provide, has proven to be enough for home users. Whether it's because no one cares to even hack a home user unless the door is wide open (because he's worthless), or a basic firewall has proven very difficult to bypass through "frontal attack" means, regardless of the reason, home users just aren't being hacked to any significant, measurable degree. If they were, it'd be the central focus of every government and law enforcement agency because of all the money, and political motivation of the outraged people, to make it stop.

Instead, we have almost literally everyone on the planet using the Internet to move / trade large amounts of money every second of every day. There isn't even rumors about anyone we know getting hacked and robbed that way, because Social Media would explode with those kinds of legitimate stories. Unless you are a big or key technology corporation or a government, you simply aren't worth any real skilled hackers time at all, and that's the truth of it.

It's a sophistry to geoblock China on security grounds and recommend and upvotes that advice, but then recommend Chinese hardware like TP Link Omada for the bedrock hardware for your home network. Yet I see TP Link Deco and Omada recommended on here every day, and upvoted into positive numbers too.

How could you possibly trust that geoblocking on Chinese hardware even works on their hardware? They get firmware updates from servers hosted in the USA, which in turn get firmware images from China. Obviously TP Link servers in the U.S. don't block China. So how effective is geoblocking if you went ahead and bought your hardware from a Chinese controlled company to save $100?

Same goes for Chinese security cameras. Everyone talks about using VLANs to isolate them, so their being compromised will not "spread" to the rest of your network. But if a compromised Chinese camera has the ability to crack the "root" account on Linux, Android, and IOS, and the "Administrator" account on Windows if left on the same VLAN, then why would it have any difficulty at all cracking the "admin" account on your router, rendering VLAN separation useless? What makes the router OS so much more resistant to takeover from that compromised IoT device versus other OSes?

It's the logic gymnastics that "security experts" on here must do to justify geoblocking China, but then recommending (or upvoting) TP Link Deco and Omada to save $100 that's hard to take seriously. Are they a threat or not? If so, how can you allow the recommendation of China owned company hardware to users with a straight face? Where is the precaution now?

What about smartphones? Smartphones all have GPS tracking, a camera, a microphone, and an Internet connection that's pretty much always on. They are the ultimate spying device that everyone carries voluntarily, even after experiencing events like talking about a certain product on the phone to your mother, and getting ads for that exact product as embedded ads hours later.

We might trust Alphabet and Apple not to sell our information to China and Russia directly, as they actually want to comply with Western laws. But isn't it also logical to believe that Alphabet and Apple sell personalized ad information to "reputable" buyers, who in turn sell it to a company that is degree less reputable, who in turn sells it to another company that's two degrees less reputable, and so on, until it gets to a seller that doesn't discriminate against any buyers, or are a front for the Chinese and Russian government itself?

They might not even need to buy this information through layers of middle men. TikTok has over 100 Million users in the US, mostly as an App on smartphones. TikTok is a Chinese owned company, and are very much a target for a complete banning by the U.S. government, but not quite there yet for everyone else (maybe due to foreign lobbying efforts?). Even with all these warning signs, 100 Million US users do not care or take it seriously, and film you and your family on their App behind your geoblocking firewall.

What about hostile governments using services that are completely legal in the U.S. directly? The same Intelligence agencies that recommend you geoblock Chinese inbound and outbound traffic have also warned that China and Russia use platforms like Facebook, X / Twitter, Instagram, and even Reddit as giant Propaganda and misinformation machines to influence politics and thinking in the West. Even now, these foreign influences still propagate unchecked, with only token "moderation" attempts to combat it (and how do we know we can trust these moderators?). The EU is currently threatening to de- platform X because of lax moderation efforts, right now, in real time.

So go ahead and geoblock China and the rest of the evil countries if it makes you feel better. But it's as effective as trying to keep your kid from looking at porn by blocking his MAC Address on your home network. There are so many other ways for access that you do not control that your single act of defiance is essentially meaningless in the bigger picture. Your personal information has already been packaged and sold to every available buyer, because we were all asleep at the wheel at the dawn of Social Media and smartphones, and did not control that information at all. Anyone and Everyone with an App or cookies were tracking and packaging you. Only recently have smartphone OSes begun to lock down your personal information, but it's far too little a decade too late.

The toothpaste is out of the tube.

All your equipment and connections are so incredibly overkill for "audio only calls" that I wouldn't bother looking for any problems there. Maybe there is some program or docker container that is running wild and maxxing out you Mac's CPU to 100%. Maybe a really bad microphone or headset. Otherwise, your setup won't even blink at an audio only teams call. We're talking <1% usage across all systems for audio communications.

It's also hard to suspect a 2 Gbps fiber connection as the culprit.

I'd try a different microphone and headset, or a different connection to them (Bluetooth or USB or even Ethernet/ VOIP). I'd suspect Bluetooth as the possible problem if in use.

I just wouldn't even suspect your Mac or network is the issue, or if it is the network, it'll be so far up into the Internet chain that you cannot fix it yourself.