recently i was wondering what products i could purchase to upgrade my home network. right now i have a 100mbps ethernet/802.11g network. and a decent investment in 802.11g devices – workgroup bridge, wireless camera, music bridge, ethernet bridge, etc.

this mostly stems from curiosity because i’m quite fine with my current set up. but maybe 2 years out i’ll start to get serious on replacing some of the devices.

so first thing would be an N router. i have always been a loyal linksys customer. just this moment i looked at the new linksys/cisco site. and it looks like cisco is either going to come out with brand new linksys products very soon or they’ve killed 3/4 of the product line. if they do the latter they’ve basically ruined linksys for me.

however, looks like asus and netgear offer linux compatible routers.
for a wireless ethernet bridge and a gigabit switch i’d probably just price compare and shop around. brand wouldn’t matter as much to me there.

for a NAS unit replacement i’d get one of the *plug devices, as i’ve mentioned before.

i almost forgot to mention the “why” of this. mostly because file sizes seem to keep getting larger and i find myself trying to move around several GB at a time. and it would be nice if i could do that a bit faster. other than that i have no reason.

update 11/9/11:
i think at the time when i was looking at the cisco/linksys website it was under construction and they’ve since added lots more products. i ended up getting the linksys E2000 802.11n  router and the sheevaplug. i’m not running custom firmware/software either yet, but i plan on putting debian on the plug soon. the tomatoUSB firmware for the E2000 was still listed as semi-experimental the last time i checked…so i’m holding off there. did i see any speed improvements with 802.11n and newer NAS hardware – most definitely.