My place of employment has an 80 Mbps upload / 80 Mbps download fiber optic connection, with approximately 150 users. The network works fine, but the network hardware is good, enterprise-class hardware: Fortigate firewall, Cisco routers, Brocade managed switches, and Extreme Networks WiFi access points.

Sure, no one is downloading games over the network, although there are a lot of software updates, but they are doing extensive YouTube and Netflix streaming, etc., and our supposedly tiny 80 Mbps connection handles multiple 2K streams without issue, and without lag or hiccups.

The first most important thing our network does beyond typical consumer hardware is traffic shaping, Quality of Service, and traffic prioritization. There simply isn’t any reason why software updates, downloads, and media streams need to have low latency, but it is critical that interactive processes get high priority. ASUS routers have some of these functions, but a router distribution such as pFSense, OPNsense, or OpenWRT, running on PC hardware will do it better than simple consumer models. Consider the “prosumer” class Omada or UniFi product lines as well.

Small but frequent critical infrastructure traffic such as DNS and clock synchronization is centralized on the network, so that each and every device is no longer getting that information from over the Internet, but from a local server, and our firewall enforces that, redirecting or blocking attempts to bypass the local server. Many Windows and Google updates are also locally handled by a server, so these updates gets downloaded only once.