I used a cheap Cisco router with 10/100 Mbps LAN thinking this should be more than fast enough for the job. Well, long story short: this router imposed the same speed limit on the LAN connections as the WAN (internet) connection. So transferring data between my devices, all with gigabit connections, never went past 25 Mbps until my ISP decided that 100 Mbps was going to be their slowest speed. All of a sudded my LAN also went to 100 Mbps
Suffice to say that shortly after I had discovered that, I bought a router with gigabit LAN.
Not Cisco as in "used to be Linksys" Cisco, but proper "used in enterprise and service provider" Cisco?
Ive never heard of something like that happening with the enterprise/service provider models.... It just seems ridiculous, coincidental, not possible for such a stupid thing to occur?!?
For me, ent/SP Cisco has been flawless for the last +/-15 years that Ive been using them, theyve got a pretty decent track record for me that would be hard to beat. Ive been through a handful of consumer brands, but none of them cut the mustard. But I probably have slightly more "eccentric" use cases for my routers, I run IPSEC and routing protocols like BGP, forming my own little VPN (aka playground) between friends and family. You cant do that with most off-the-shelf consumer brand router unless you flash it with one of those 3rd party images ..... the names of which escapes me right now as I type this.
But ent/SP Ciscos, particularly the lower end models, have never been known for raw performance. They might have 10/100 even gigabit ports on them, and while you may be able to switch data, i.e. Layer 2, at those speeds you'll be hard pressed to route, i.e. Layer 3, at those speeds. They arent necessarily built for performance, just lots of features, some obscure features that various enterprise customers need for their LANs and WANs. You cant chuck something like a 2600XM with two 10/100 ports in somewhere and expect to get anywhere near 100mbit through it just because it has 100mbit ports... Suffice to say, if youre going to buy a "proper" Cisco, do your research first. Understand what it is the box was designed to do in the first place, and buy accordingly.