Combining port bandwidth into a consumer wifi router.

[stonent01]

Lets say you have a mixed environment (i.e. home lab) with a consumer grade Netgear R6100 802.11AC 1200Mbit wifi router that has an integrated 4 port 100Mbit switch and some Cisco hardware as well.

Because the 100Mbit ports could be a choke point for some wireless devices talking to Ethernet devices, would there be any benefit in trying to combine all of those ports in some way into 4 ports into a Cisco gigabit switch via a trunk or some other method, or would that just be a wasted effort as the Netgear device would have no idea what you were trying to do? The ideal scenario, if it worked would be now 400Mbits of bandwidth between the wired and wireless devices instead of 100.

I've tried many variants of searching google for a topic on this but everything I find seems to deal with trunking between a Netgear managed switch and a Cisco switch.

I do understand the possibility of this not being doable, I thought I'd ask mainly to find out if it would be a wasted effort.

Thanks for any comments!

[Mark Malone]

Hi

A trunk won't work you need an etherchannel that will bundle the piorts together each side , the problem with a standard trunk is STP will still block the ports  , does the netgear device support LACP or LAG I cant see online that it does , if you want to be able to do this both sides would need to support bundling , depending on Cisco switch it should be able to support LACP

[devils_advocate]

Just to second what Mark has said really.

The 4 LAN ports on the Netgear will effectively be an unmanaged L2 switch and likely have no concept of Vlans etc. Even if it could do Vlans, a trunk would not work as Spanning Tree would block all but one of the ports.

Unless the device supports some sort of Link Aggregation (which I suspect it doesn't) then your only option is so get a Router which has Gigabit LAN ports so you get 10x the bandwidth, consumer routers are cheap anyway so this is likely the easiest and cheapest option.