Warning: 100 Mbit ethernet switches are still prevalent in small towns!

[nadrach]

The LAN speed question has been around for as long as I can remember. When 10 Mbps was the norm (which in my case involved SCO Xenix on a Telecomms carrier system) anything over 30% or 3 Mbps actual traffic was considered excessive congestion, because of the inherent design limitations of LAN data packet transfer. One colleague considered LAN as the electronic equivalent of a sewage farm and a windmill, everyone gets a bit and you hope that what arrived at your gate was yours and didnt smell too much. The coming new super uprate to 100 Mbps was greeted with, "Ah ... faster delivery!" But then, he'd sat on a standards committee that considered an alternative point-to-point idea called ATM (I think ... and nothing to do with cash delivery), but went with 100 Mbps "chuck-it-and-see-who-gets-it" LAN because "we already have the wiring". When early retirement subsequently appeared in the run-up to Y2K, he took it so fast there was a "Bang" on his departure.
Gigabit suffers from backwards compatibility, so still runs into horrendous contention at 30% of capacity.
I get to use a network that involves a VPN punching through a superfast broadband, but the various data mismatches reduce it at times to little better than modem speed. A side-effect of measuring this situation to find a cure has exposed that WiFi is generally hard-wired for a 10:1 favouring of download versus upload. So if you have a NAS on your home router and try to upload a file (especially a large one such as a video file) by WiFi, the buffering that results not only chokes the data flow, but may also corrupt.
The only system that seems to break the mould is/are PowerLAN units. Data flow on these seems to be even-handed (possibly because the manufacturer has no idea which unit will be attached to what and cannot preselect a preferred direction?) and I have had better transmission in a domestic network built with several of these units than with ethernet switches and conventional cabling.
About the only thing I would consider better is to rip out all the CAT5, etc., and use domestic fibre. When that becomes cost-effective, bye-bye LAN; and for me that cannot happen too soon.

[1clue]

@nadrach,

I remember this time. In my case it was Linux and IBM A/IX and IBM OS/400. I also remember when 1Mb/s phone lines were being used even in the office.

I've never set up a VPN on my own, so I don't know about the mismatch. The ones I use seem to be pretty balanced but are mostly to and from commercial businesses, which to me implies that the balance can be tuned. Certainly generic ISPs have an imbalance especially on home or small business networks. I run into that all the time, with or without VPN.

I use 802.11ac for home networking, but that's not the same subnet as my business stuff. The business stuff (still in my home) runs on wired gigabit ethernet (soho, not managed) and in a couple cases I bond a couple adapters together to relieve congestion point-to-point. I regularly feel that wired gigabit is not nearly fast enough, but can't afford anything faster.

My ISP is advertised as 30/5, I almost always get 35/6 or better on speed tests, and in real-world transfers to/from a VPN I often get about 80% of that if my math is right with respect to the encryption overhead involved. I don't know about non-vpn data rates because all my big data is to/from a VPN endpoint.

Skype/Webex/etc is not so high in bandwidth I think. Skype is terrible for CPU overhead though, I regularly have my laptop go into thermal shutdown. My wife lives on the wifi side of things, as does all our home-oriented junk. But there's a lot of that: My wireless router has had 37 devices listed in the device list, and they were all known to be mine. TVs, BD-Rs, phones, laptops, cameras, Raspberry Pis, yadda yadda. That traffic stays out of my gigabit ethernet subnet unless (in the case of 2 rpi's) it's providing a business service.

[speedwell68]

@Speedwell68, I just got into rpi as well with 3xB+ boards. Not doing media with any of them, but I'm curious as to how well they work? Any truly good quality audio from them?

I am using 3 standard model Bs. I am running them on Openelec 4.0.7. The audio is over the HDMI lead into the TV and is perfect, IMHO. I did use the analogue audio and TBH I found it a little noisy. However one of the improvements of the B+ is that they have cleaned up the analogue audio.

I will say that a RPI as a HTPC is not an out of the box solution. But if you are prepared to get your hands dirty with the OS and XBMC they can be truly awesome. Mine are overclocked to 1Ghz, I have modified the config.txt for better HDMI operation and have modified advancedsetting.xml to include dirty regions.